Model for predicting the restoration of and ammonium migration from in situ mine sites

There are many uranium deposits which are too deep, too poor in quality or too small in extent to be economically strip mined. It now appears that this uranium can be mined using in situ leaching processes. One component of the lixiviant is necessarily a cation and, during the course of mining, the ion exchange sites of the minerals in the mine zone become saturated with this cation. Ammonium is the cation now commonly used. Clearly, any restoration procedure or question involving the rate of cation migration with the groundwater all necessarily involve the process of ion exchange coupled with flow in porous media. The equations describing this process are presented in this paper and numerical solutions obtained. 16 refs