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Critical mineral recovery from unconventional sources: developing a workflow to evaluate placer tailings for critical mineral potential
Harris, Isabelle T.
Harris, Isabelle T.
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2024-04
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Abstract
Critical minerals are vital to the economy and national security of the United States due to their essential functionality and vulnerable supply chains. The U.S. is significantly dependent on other countries for many of these minerals, making the transition to domestic production of these materials a strategic priority. Critical minerals are also essential to sustainable development and are crucial to renewable energy technologies. As such, there is an urgent need to develop multi-disciplinary, techno-economic workflows for critical mineral recovery from unconventional sources such as mine waste (tailings). To work towards these goals, I am conducting a case study of gold placer mine tailings in Flat, Alaska to determine the viability of reprocessing tailings and extracting critical elements. The town of Flat is a historic gold mine in the Kuskokwim Mountains that consists of fluvial placer deposits on creeks that flank a mineralized granitic intrusive body. The Flat tailings present potential critical element contents of tungsten, arsenic, chromium, and tin, as well as other non-critical elements. These elements are associated with or occur within the structure of various mineral phases. The first stage of this project involves mineral processing and analytical techniques to define a workflow for processing tailings and determining bulk geochemistry, volume, and weight percentage of minerals present. Critical mineral recovery from mine tailings has the potential to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development goals and a circular economy, the reduction of mining waste, and the mitigation of environmental hazards associated with tailings.
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