DESIGN OF COPPER SX PLANTS TO MINIMIZE STATIC AND OTHER FIRE RISKS IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT INDUSTRY FIRES

摘要

The first two commercial copper solvent extraction (CuSX) plants were small scale plants built in Arizona for Ranchers Bluebird Mine and Bagdad Copper in the USA in the late 1960s for treatment of heap leach and dump leach solutions respectively and producing 5500-6500 stpa cathode copper. These plants were followed shortly afterwards by the very much larger scale CuSX plant for ZCCM at Chingola, Zambia, for treatment of tailings leach solution and producing approximately 100,000 tpa cathode copper. Since then, CuSX plants have ultimately proliferated on a world wide basis, providing largely continuing improvements in design and seemingly ever decreasing unit capital and operating costs as plant sizes have increased from an early low of around 5,000 tpa to up to a current maximum of 168,000 tpa (185,000 stpa) at the world's currently largest electrowinning (EW) plant at Morenci, Arizona1 or the even larger 200,000 tpa capacity plant to be built for the Spence project under development in Chile. However, it would seem that somewhere along this development path of continually reducing unit capital costs that an air of complacency inadvertently crept into the design process for certain plant configurations. For plants designed prior to 2002, it would seem highly likely that the risks of fire occurrence and control may not have been adequately addressed and minimized. It is possibly only for plants designed within the last 2-3 years that fire safety issues have now been closely examined and incorporated into appropriate low risk designs.