tailings
Tailings are the ground-up rock left over after the valuable minerals have been removed at a processing plant. The material is usually a wet, fine-grained slurry and has to be stored somewhere safe.
Technisch gezien: Tailings are the finely comminuted residue remaining after the target mineral or metal has been extracted from crushed and milled ore during mineral processing. They are distinct from waste rock in that they have passed through the mill and are typically fine-grained and often discharged as a slurry. Because tailings may contain residual reagents, heavy metals and sulfide minerals, their geochemical character — particularly their acid-generating potential — governs storage and long-term closure requirements.
Mining
tailings dam
A tailings dam is a large engineered embankment built to hold the wet waste material from a mine's processing plant. Unlike a water dam built all at once, it is usually raised in stages over the life of the mine.
Technisch gezien: A tailings dam, more precisely termed a tailings storage facility (TSF), is an engineered containment structure designed to impound tailings slurry and allow the water fraction to be decanted or evaporate for reuse or controlled release. TSFs differ fundamentally from conventional water-retention dams in that they are frequently raised incrementally using the tailings themselves or derived materials, and their structural properties change as the impounded material consolidates. The method of raise construction — upstream, downstream or centreline — has direct implications for seismic stability and failure risk, and is the primary technical distinction drawn in regulatory and engineering assessments.
Mining