Cleaning up Wismut's waste dumps

The intensive uranium ore mining activities in Saxony and Thuringia up until 1990 have produced not only some 220,000 t of uranium but also a multitude of shafts, dumps, sludge ponds, and a big hole left over from open-cast mining, on a total plant area of approx. 37 square kilometers. Decommissioning and disposing of these installations, and cleaning up and recultivating the plant areas, is the purposes and sole activity of Wismut GmbH. Under applicable law, the strategy of the firm is aimed at using modern technical procedures to decommission and dispose of the mining and dressing facilities and make plant ni ens and the sire available for other uses and in doing so, strike an optimum balance between ecological, economic, and social aspects of cleanup For this purpose, international experience is utilized by the firm in arranging workshops on important problems. After flooding of the mines and clearing of the tailings had been treated in previous years, a workshop on dump cleanup was organized in Chemnitz in November 1995. The paper deals with aspects of preparing for dump cleanup on the Aue and Ronneburg sites.