Safety
By dewatering the tailings and eliminating the surface pond, HDS improves the stability and safety of tailings storage, a key element of the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management (GISTM). Meanwhile, in the event an HDS facility does fail, the lower interstitial water content and surface pond volume reduces the potential for flow, and thus the potential area of inundation. The dewatered tailings simply do not flow well, making the large-scale mudslides associated with previous tailings dam failures a thing of the past.
HDS technology delivers this without the need to build capital-intensive plant, as in other thickened and filtered tailings solutions. It is therefore able to offer similar benefits, at a fraction of the cost. The free-draining nature of HDS may also make the process suitable for tailings dewatering in tropical climates, which aren’t well suited to the operational complexity of filtered tailings.