Choosing an appropriate post mining land use in surface mines regarding renewable energies as the new alternatives (Case study:Sangan iron ore placer mine)

Mining operation is crucial and inevitable activities for the supplying of raw material for industries. In spite of the benefits achieved by mining, it also has many adverse impacts on the environment of the mined lands. Mine reclamation is one of the most important processes in mining operation and plays a key role regarding environmental policy for governments. Many regulations regarding environment protection force the mine operators to define a definite approach for mine closure phase. Selecting the reclamation alternatives for mine sites is an intricate task because of many criteria which should be considered in feasible study. Nowadays, multi criteria decision making methods assist the mine engineers to opt an optimum alternative for Post Mining Land Use (PMLU) . Among the different mathematical models which introduced day by day, the Analytical Hierarch Processing (AHP) is one of the popular methods which in spite of elapsed more than three decades from introducing by Saaty in 1982, it is still an effective path for assisting decision makers in this field. This paper has an overview on different PMLUs alternatives on surface mines and focuses on renewable energies as the new approaches for PMLU in surface mines. The results showed that renewable energies such as wind farm and photovoltaic power stations in susceptible areas should be taken in account as the new approaches for selecting PMLUs in surface mines. Investigating on PMLU determination on Sangan Iron ore placer mine as the case study in this paper also showed that the most favorable alternative for the mine reclamation is developing a wind farm due to the ecological and environmental advantageous of the mine site.

Keywords:

Reclamation , PMLU , wind farm , Sangan Iron ore placer mine , AHP