JOURNAL COMMENT

Mining papers revisit old issues

Per definition, the Journal of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy publishes papers related to mining and metallurgy. The Journal publishes about 140 papers every year, with an approximately equal number of contributions related to mining and metallurgy. This edition is somewhat atypical, in that two of the seven papers are related to metallurgy, and five are mining papers. The two metallurgy papers originated in South Africa, specifically, Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria. The mining papers were all written outside South Africa. A Czech paper in this edition explores the possibility of using a closed underground mine as a source of service water. Before I started school, in the sixties, my family lived in Potchefstroom. There were regular visits to my maternal grandmother in Pretoria. The national road network was developed only later, and our route took us past a water discharge point of what must have been one of the large West Rand gold mines. I remember my father from time to time remarking on the torrent of discharge water. It will be interesting to read a review on South African efforts to extract underground water to counteract the effects of decanting of mine water, an issue that was somewhat contentious some time ago. Possibly, some contributions from the online conference on Mine-Impacted Water, held middle October, will also find their way in the Journal. The route from Potchefstroom to Pretoria also took us past mine dumps. It is only on skimming a second mining paper, from China, considering factors determining the maximum height of a mine waste dump that I realized that there is (and was) a scientific basis for the proximity of these dumps to a public road.

P. Pistorius

University of Pretoria