Accidental Water Pollution Risk Analysis of Mine Tailings Ponds in Guanting Reservoir Watershed, Zhangjiakou City, China

Renzhi Liu, Jing Liu, Zhijiao Zhang, Alistair Borthwick and Ke Zhang
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Renzhi Liu: State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, Xinjiekouwai Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100875, China
Jing Liu: State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, Xinjiekouwai Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100875, China
Zhijiao Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, Xinjiekouwai Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100875, China
Alistair Borthwick: School of Engineering, the King’s Buildings, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JL, UK
Ke Zhang: College of Civil Construction Engineering, Zhengzhou Institute of Aeronautical Industry Management, Zhengzhou 450015, China

IJERPH, 2015, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-16

Abstract: Over the past half century, a surprising number of major pollution incidents occurred due to tailings dam failures. Most previous studies of such incidents comprised forensic analyses of environmental impacts after a tailings dam failure, with few considering the combined pollution risk before incidents occur at a watershed-scale. We therefore propose Watershed-scale Tailings-pond Pollution Risk Analysis (WTPRA), designed for multiple mine tailings ponds, stemming from previous watershed-scale accidental pollution risk assessments. Transferred and combined risk is embedded using risk rankings of multiple routes of the “source-pathway-target” in the WTPRA. The previous approach is modified using multi-criteria analysis, dam failure models, and instantaneous water quality models, which are modified for application to multiple tailings ponds. The study area covers the basin of Gutanting Reservoir (the largest backup drinking water source for Beijing) in Zhangjiakou City, where many mine tailings ponds are located. The resultant map shows that risk is higher downstream of Gutanting Reservoir and in its two tributary basins ( i.e. , Qingshui River and Longyang River). Conversely, risk is lower in the midstream and upstream reaches. The analysis also indicates that the most hazardous mine tailings ponds are located in Chongli and Xuanhua, and that Guanting Reservoir is the most vulnerable receptor. Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses are performed to validate the robustness of the WTPRA method.

Keywords: risk analysis; mine tailings pond; heavy metal; water pollution; Guanting Reservoir; watershed (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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