THE MINETRAIN PROJECT: DEVELOPING AN ADVANCED LEVEL TRAINING PROGRAM FOR MINING INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS IN AN ACTUAL DEEP MINE SITE

摘要

In an extremely competitive mining industry, onsite experience is a big advantage. Mining education at the universities is mostly focused on theoretical studies without a possibility of practical training in mining sites. Hence, experimental mines suitable for practical education are needed to provide a platform for systematic research and education in industrial scale and for training in real mining conditions. Yet, this kind of mine sites is rare worldwide.Thus, a new educational research project, namely MINETRAIN is introduced in this paper evaluating the transition of the Pyhasalmi mine in Central Finland from an active base metal mine to a research, educational and training underground facility. The uniqueness of MINETRAIN compared to other test mine programs is that the existing state-of-art infrastructure in Pyhasalmi enables research and training facilities among all disciplines related to the overall mine value chain. Though all the above sound interesting in the context of research and education purposes, in practice Pyhasalmi will have to become an experimental mine that can be sustainable in the future. Accordingly, a prefeasibility study is being conducted and some preliminary results are presented in this paper.