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ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Variably Saturated Reactive Transport of Arsenic in Heap-Leach Facilities

David L. Decker^a,*, Jirka imnek^b, Scott W. Tyler^c, Charalambos Papelis^d and Mark J. Logsdon^e

^a Desert Research Institute, 2215 Raggio Parkway, Reno, NV 89512 USA
^b Dep. of Environmental Sciences, A135 Bourns Hall, Univ. of California, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521 USA
^c Dep. of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and Dep. of Geological Sciences and Engineering, MS 175, Univ. of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557-0180 USA
^d Desert Research Institute, 755 E. Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, NV 89119 and Water Resources Management Graduate Program, Univ. of Nevada, 4505 Maryland Pkwy., Las Vegas, NV 89154-4029 USA
^e Geochimica Inc., 9045 Soquel Drive, Suite 2, Aptos, CA 95003 USA
^* Corresponding author (dave.decker{at}dri.edu)

Received 14 March 2005.

A variably saturated reactive transport software package, UNSATCHEM, has been modified for the purposes of simulating As oxyanion transport in gold mine heap-leach facilities. Gold-ore deposits in the Carlin Trend, located in northeastern Nevada and western Utah, are characterized in part by the occurrence of As-bearing minerals. The large-scale mining methodology used on the Carlin Trend includes the use of large-scale heap-leach facilities in which an extractive solution is used to dissolve the gold from the ore. This solution also is capable of dissolving other minerals, including those that contain As. While these facilities are generally environmentally benign compared with sulfide waste rock dumps associated with other mining provinces around the world, controlling the flux of As from the heap-leach facility after mining has ceased is of interest to the mining and regulatory communities. We present three examples that use the As transport capable version of UNSATCHEM to simulate the effect of three commonly applied heap-leach facility closure methodologies. The results demonstrate the importance of including geochemistry in transport simulations and illustrate the highly nonlinear behavior that is produced from a coupled flow and reactive geochemistry numerical solver.

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