The Arctic Project is designed as a conventional truck-shovel operation with 144 t trucks and 15 m3 shovels. The pit design includes four nested phases to balance stripping requirements while satisfying the concentrator requirements. The design parameters include a ramp width of 30 m, road grades of 10%, bench height of 5 m, targeted mining width between 70 and 100 m, berm interval of 20 m, variable slope angles by sector and a minimum mining width of 30 m.
According to SRK’s geotechnical recommendations, a large talc zone located in the northeast pit slope must be completely removed. To achieve this, a pit optimization giving dummy values to the talc zone blocks was performed. This pit optimization was used as the basis for the mine design.
The smoothed final pit design contains approximately 46.7 Mt of ore and 340.2 Mt of waste for a resulting stripping ratio of 7.3:1. Within the 46.7 Mt of ore, the average grades are 2.11% Cu, 2.90% Zn, 0.56% Pb, 0.42 g/t Au and 31.83 g/t Ag.
Interim Phase Design
The deposit is mined in four nested phases, including the ultimate pit limit. During pre-production, the phasing strategy maximizes waste mining while minimizing the ore tonnage. This is primarily due to the lack of space to build ore stockpiles. In addition, the phasing strategy maintains enough exposed ore to guarantee the continuous operation of the process plant during the production.
A stockpile is required to store the ore ........
