JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Out of the 33 entries in the competition that Russian diamond miner Alrosa launched to find a technical solution for resuming mining operations at the Mir deposit, three projects have been awarded the second and third places, but no outright winner was named.

The second place was taken by two projects, one of which was presented by employees of Alrosa and the other by the Yakutniproalmaz Institute. The third place was awarded to a project by five authors representing several organisations.

The basic concept of the technical solutions selected is to exclude the ingress of groundwater into existing mine workings of the Mir mine, says Alrosa chief engineer Andrey Cherepnov.

“It is possible to resume mining at the Mir mine only after the creation of a security pillar to prevent the ingress of brines from the Meteger-Ichersky Water-Bearing Complex into the existing mine workings system. This is due to the fact that a significant portion of workings has been performed with halogen-carbonate rocks," he explains.

None of the proposed solutions could solve the problem as a whole, as such, the competition committee, headed by Alrosa first deputy CEO Igor Sobolev, did not award a first place.

“Our next task is to bring together the most successful technical solutions in order to propose a single concept for the resumption of mining operations based thereon," says Cherepnov, adding that the concept will be presented at the All-Russian Conference later in April.

Alrosa will pay one-million rubles to each team whose project took the second place. The third place will be rewarded with 500 000 rubles. The authors of the remaining seven projects that came through to the final round will receive incentive awards in the amount of 100 000 rubles.

Most applications for the competition, which Alrosa launched in January, came from Russian cities, including Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Yakutsk. One proposal came from South Africa.

Operations at the Mir deposit were suspended in August last year, after a flood killed eight people underground.