In a unique move, ALROSA had invited entries for project proposals for the resumption of work at the Mir mine.

The committee overseeing the competition selected two projects at the second place and one at the third place. However, none of the submitted projects was able to muster up enough points to make it to first place. 

However, ALROSA stated: “The technical solutions proposed will be used during the development of the mining works resumption concept.”

Out of a total of 33 projects that were chosen for the second stage, 10 made it to the final round of the competition, during which their authors presented their proposals at the meeting of the competition committee headed by Igor Sobolev, First Deputy CEO - Executive Director of ALROSA.

“All projects were evaluated from the standpoint of their scientific and technical as well as technological validity, degree of readiness to be commissioned, compliance with the requirements of industrial safety for mining operations, feasibility at the existing modern level of development of industry and technology, economic efficiency, and the completeness of the proposed solution development,” ALROSA said, defining the scope of the proposals.

The two proposals which tied  at second place were: “Project for the resumption of mining at the Mir mine” (authors: А.А. Korovenkov and R.A. Zakharov, ALROSA employees) and “Ensuring safe working conditions for the pit reserves of the Mir mine under a water facility due to the reconstruction of the pit with its filling with a low-filtering rock mass in the interval of the water-bearing complex” (authors: A.N. Akishev and V.V. Lobanov, Yakutniproalmaz Institute).

The third place was awarded to the project “Complex of measures to ensure safety and development of the technology for excavating the Mir mine after being flooded” (authors: K.V. Bulatov, Y.A. Dik, A.V. Kotenkov, Lothar te Kamp, Robert Sterrett, representing several organizations).

“The basic concept of these technical solutions is to exclude the ingress of groundwater into existing mine workings of the Mir mine. It is possible to resume mining at the Mir mine only after the creation of a security pillar to prevent the ingress of brines from the Meteger-Ichersky Water-Bearing Complex (MIWBC) into the existing mine workings system,” explained Andrey Cherepnov, Chief Engineer of ALROSA and deputy chairman of the competition committee. “This is due to the fact that a significant portion of workings has been performed with halogen-carbonate rocks. In the opinion of the committee, the proposed solutions are the most acceptable from the viewpoint of safety of mining operations resumption on the Mir pipe and are the least expensive. At the same time, none of the proposed solutions can be considered exhaustive, that is, solving the problem as a whole. As such, we did not award the first place. Our next task is to bring together the most successful technical solutions in order to propose a single concept for the resumption of mining operations based thereon.”

It is hoped that  a holistic and sound solution can be found at the All-Russian Conference “Experience and practical steps to restore the mining enterprise after an accident,” which will be held on April 25-26, 2018 in Moscow, at which various proposals will be presented. The authors who  have come through to the final part of the competition, will also be invited to participate.

ALROSA announced that it will award RUB 1 million to each team whose project took the second place; while the team at the third place will be rewarded with RUB 500,000. Apart from this, the other seven proposals that came through to the final round, will receive incentive awards of RUB 100,000.

The competition was announced in early January of this year. ALROSA said that while most applications came from Russian cities, including Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Yakutsk, one proposal came from South Africa.