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Open letter to the organizer of the tailings dam round robin exercise

Dear Ryan, please receive this open letter to the organizer of the tailings dam round robin exercise. It explains our position on the round robin exercise you have promoted. As you know we enthusiastically adhered to your round robin proposal although we found a bit odd that such an exercise would be led by a consultant, thus not an impartial entity. Very quickly we started asking for more data, as the knowledge base seemed rather generic. We were not surprised…

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Multi dimensional Consequences

Multi dimensional Consequences approaches take into consideration the varied losses that a failure can generate. Thus they allow for a more thorough and rational evaluation of a failure potential consequences. Indeed, by breaking down the consequences into distinct dimensions, such as environmental, economic, and social, an additive evaluation of multi dimensional consequences can provide a more realistic assessment of the risks associated with a failure. This approach also allows for greater consideration of the long-term implications of the failure. These…

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Diverge from “cosi fan tutti”!

We need to diverge from “cosi fan tutti” if we want to truly bring something valuable to our profession and the public. Some professions are open to “disruption” and thus foster innovation. However, many voices around the world comment that strategic/ operational risk assessments, including tailings risk assessments are stuck in a complacent lull. Bring something valuable to our profession and the public is way more than doing our job diligently and perhaps having a fantastic career. Indeed, our friend…

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TMW2022 discussion and video presentation

TMW2022 discussion and video presentation covers some important points and coveys our gratitude to the friendly colleagues that helped us overcome a significant work overload. Indeed, for the first time since 2013, we could not make it to the conference to present in person the results of our R&D. We were particularly sorry for this, as the reviewer wrote: The authors present a discussion on how to optimize actions needed to address risk mitigation to ALARP for a large TSF…

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Tailings risk assessment methods comparison

In order to develop a Tailings risk assessment methods comparison we will start by: reviewing a number of existing alternatives to ORE2_Tailings™. This leads to justify the need for the ORE2_Tailings™ approach, discussing what we call the Blackbox objection, which actually applies to all the alternatives and finally the ORE2_Tailings™ procedure, algorithm and results. Alternatives to ORE2_Tailings™ We have grouped possible alternatives into four families discussed below. FMEA FMEA is not a quantitative risk assessment even if it uses indices…

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A risky mission

We undertake a risky mission today. That is to reply to information requests we have received from various interested readers in a very concise manner. The risks of the mission mostly arise from: the wide breath of the requests: “please let us know where we could learn about Riskope tailings management activities and methodologies” and the necessity to select among the vast available documentation. A classic preliminary reply We generally start our reply by inviting interested readers to visit Riskope’s…

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Worldwide tailings benchmarks ten years later

A colleague sent us a paper by Rana, Ghahramani, Evans, Small, Skermer, McDougall and Take.  We reference it herein as Rana’s 2022 paper. The title is “Global magnitude-frequency statistics of the failures and impacts of large water-retention dams and mine tailings impoundments”. It is available online since Aug. 3rd 2022 at Earth-Science Reviews (2022), . I must confess at first I was quite intimidated. Almost a decade earlier we had written Factual and Foreseeable Reliability of Tailings Dams and Nuclear…

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Questions on ALARP studies at Tailings 2022

 Readers and conference delegates asked the following Questions on ALARP studies at Tailings 2022 and when they read a case study on ALARP optimization. National regulation compliance Are the results of an ALARP analysis consistent with national regulations and design requirements?  When we perform an ALARP analysis we consider local regulations. These will drive some a priori mitigative selections by the engineer of record. These bear on the nature and aim of mitigation stages  for the ALARP analysis. For instance,…

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