Environmental Aspects of the Mine-inundation of the Recsk Deep Copper Mine, Hungary

The Recsk Copper mine was planned to operate in some 1,200 m depth from the surface in the Mátra Mountains in Northern Hungary.

by B. Kovács, T. M. Tóth

The site was investigated from 1970, using geophysical prospecting, by deep drillings and later two shafts and some investigation tunnels were made to control the quality of the ore. The operation of the mine was assured by intensive water excavation to keep the shafts and tunnels dry. Due to unfavorable changes on the world market of copper ore and the increasing production costs, the excavation became unproductive, which led to the decision of the termination of further investigations and the closure of the mine at the end of 1999. The shafts and tunnels were cleaned as much as possible and the pumps were also stopped. The filling up of the underground space started about three years ago and parallel to this measure the continuous monitoring of the system began. The previous geological investigations, new evaluation of the fracture pattern network of the different rock bodies, and the data logged during the recovery process gave a unique opportunity of further investigation of groundwater (GW) hydraulics of the area. The practical aim of investigation is to model the recovery of the Recsk-system, but also to couple the fracture pattern simulation models with fluid dynamic ground water (FD GW) flow models in order to get a user-friendly numerical environment for further investigations.

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published: Lehrstuhl für Abfallverwertungstechnik und Abfallwirtschaft der Montanuniversität Leoben, DepoTech 2004 (November 2004), 9|2004
Keywords: Collection, Landfilling, Policy Tax Instruments, Hungary