Abstract

Chile is the third country with most tailing dams worldwide (764, of which 15% active, 62% inactive, and 23% abandoned). Today, one of the main challenges of the mining industry is to ensure environmental sustainability. To achieve this, it is not only necessary to have regulations guaranteeing correct design, maintenance, closure stages, but also supervision and suitable technology enabling rapid, reliable, and cost-effective diagnosis of the overall tailings dam stability. For the last 20 years, French instrumented dynamic cone penetrometer, P.A.N.D.A®, has been used for in-depth quality control of tailings deposits, mainly due to its rapidity, portability, easy-to-use, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly testing which is based on standardized methods and able to produce immediate results. The last few years, different studies have been carried out to characterize tailings dams from a geotechnical perspective as well as to assess their spatial and temporal variability. This article presents a summary of the 20 years of Chilean experience in compaction quality control and geotechnical characterization of mine waste facilities using P.A.N.D.A® to assess the overall stability, slope analysis stability, liquefaction triggering, spatial variability of material properties and evaluation of some geotechnical parameters. Indeed, given the scale of the problem these structures represent for the community and the environment, it seemed necessary to bring together most of the work carried out in Chile to propose an innovative alternative to the rest of the mining community.