The study of the stress-strain state of the massif in mining uranium at “VOSTGOK” deposits

Abstract

Being one of the world’s largest uranium producers(about 2% of the world’s production), the state enterprise “Vostochnyi Mining and Processing Works” (“VostGOK”) provides about 40% of Ukraine’s nuclear power stations with uranium raw materials. Considering the conditions of uranium deposits exploitation (location in densely populated areas, protected sites etc.), to protect the environment from possible emissions of radioactive elements room mining is applied with subsequent backfilling of the dead area with consolidating mixtures. This technology is economically reasonable at deposits with the increased uranium content. To exclude a number of labour-consuming and environmentally dangerous operations from the production process, lean uranium-containing ores are reasonable to be mined applying underground block leaching. This enables reaching maximum values of mineral extraction and avoiding considerable material expenditures on backfilling mixture preparation and backfilling dead rooms, as they are almost completely backfilled with the muck pile, and on utilization of waste after the mined ore primary processing (barren rocks and off-balance ores) on the daylight surface.