The large-scale coal mining has caused serious environmental pollution and ecological damage in the coal mining areas in China. The serious conditions are listed as below: the geological disasters such as landslide, dilapidation, mud-rock flow and so on aroused by mining subsidence; the side effects such as land occupying, side sloping, filtrating and raised dust brought by the waste rock and g...

Surface coal mines prior to 1950 in the USA were generally left without any reclamation. As government regulations advanced since then, mine operators were required to backfill the area and plant grasses or trees. After the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) was passed in 1977 in the USA, mine operators were required to conduct pre-mining analyses of the site and to desi...

As part of the Periodic X-ray Scheme of the National Coal Board (NCB), a comparison is made between the previous and new films of all miners who were face-workers on the former occasion, five years earlier. This assessment is made by distributing the films randomly to all the NCB readers. This paper compares the rank of coal mined in each colliery with each colliery's percentage prevalence of p...

Coal blending is a critically important process in the coal mining industry as it directly influences the number of product tonnes and the total revenue generated by a mine site. Coal blending represents a challenging and complex problem with numerous blending possibilities, multiple constraints and competing objectives. At many mine sites, blending decisions are made using heuristics that have...

In the first decade of the 21st century, as a typical coal province and mining economic region, Shanxi province made a great contribution to the national economic construction and reform. At the same time, coal mining has caused serious damage to the ecological environment, excessive use of resources, the deterioration of the ecological environment and a decline in the sustainable development c...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether the recent increases in the prevalence of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) in the USA reflect increased measured exposures over recent decades, and to identify other potential causative factors. METHODS The observed CWP prevalence was calculated for 12,408 underground coal miner participants in the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program for the period 2005-200...

The mining industry is highly suitable for the application of robotics and automation technology, since the work is arduous, dangerous, and often repetitive. This paper presents a broad overview of the issues involved in the development of a physically large and complex field robotic system—a 3500-tonne mining machine (dragline). Draglines are “walking cranes” used in open-pit coal mining to re...

The Australian coal industry has been described as being a perpetual case of ‘profitless prosperity’. This implies that foreign companies invest in low-margin mining activities with motives other than profit. It is argued that foreign investors and Japanese trading companies in particular used government investment concessions and subsidies to help create oversupply in the seaborne coal market....

Southern Appalachian forests are recognized as a biodiversity hot spot of global significance, particularly for endemic aquatic salamanders and mussels. The dominant driver of land-cover and land-use change in this region is surface mining, with an ever-increasing proportion occurring as mountaintop mining with valley fill operations (MTVF). In MTVF, seams of coal are exposed using explosives, ...

The first step in mining activities is rock excavation in both mine development and production. Constant pressure for cost reduction and creating an improved/safe work environment for personnel has naturally resulted in increased use of mechanical excavation systems in many mining operations. Also, mechanical excavation and mining is more compatible with automation, meaning possibility of reduc...