This is the second time I've seen a story on mining hit HN, it always strikes me as a bit odd as the two worlds are miles apart. But I find them both fascinating (I work in both industries concurrently - by day I'm working for a production drill manufacturer and by night I'm a founder of a startup).
We manufacture underground production drills and have drills at every major underground mine in Canada and many of the other large underground mines around the world. We have equipment at Kidd Creek which is the deepest mine in Canada. When I first began to learn about the conditions underground the first thing that surprised me was the temperature in the mines. It's hot!
In some mines it's so hot that a human can't comfortably work for long, or at all. AngloGold Ashanti's TauTona mine in South Africa is sitting somewhere around 3.9km (Nearly 13,000 feet). The rock face in TauTona at its current depth reaches 60C. This is where it starts to get even more interesting for me. At these depths is hazardous for a human to work but there remains precious metals at greater depths. The technology to reach it and automate the extraction of these minerals is non-trivial and the current tech isn't advanced enough to reach it reliably. There are interesting problems that integrate software and heavy-duty hardware (30,000lb drills).
For me, I think of mine stories like space stories. They both tend to have elements of designing and applying technology to overcome the challenges of nature in extreme conditions. The common ideas of adventure, exploration, and achieving new understanding to see things (and profit) no one else has ever seen before also help.
One of the better software and systems engineers I've worked with grew up working mines in West Virginia and Western Virginia. After retiring after 25 years as a foreman, he went to school and ended up with a PhD in some area of C.S.
Wanting to get his hands dirty, he ended up building several major systems for the U.S. military. He said the parallels of operating machinery, safely, in dangerous environments struck him almost every day.
The Kidd Mine is in northern Ontario, 500 miles northwest of Toronto. The mine began operation in 1966, producing copper, zinc, indium, cadmium, silver and sulphuric acid. The deposit is one of the largest and richest volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits in the world.
There is an underground mine, and metallurgical facilities consisting of a copper concentrator, smelter and refinery, and zinc, cadmium, indium plant, liquid sulphur dioxide and sulfuric acid plant. Kidd's concentrating, smelting and refining processes are among the most advanced in the world.
The mine currently employs 1400 people and operates 7 days a week with two 12-hour shifts. The properties comprise 14 patented half lots covering 896 hectares of freehold mining land.
Kidd Creek has three shafts known as the No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 mines. Mine D is currently being developed to access reserves below the 6,800 foot to the 9,500 foot level. Commissioning for Mine D expansion began in 2004, and is scheduled to increase the operation's ultimate capacity, in stages, to 2.7Mt/yr of ore to 2012 and deepen Kidd Creek Mine to a final depth of 9,500 ft and extending the life of mine to 2017. Kidd is the deepest base metal mine in the world.
TIL: According to Wikipedia, although there are deeper mines in the world, the bottom of this one is closer to the centre of the Earth than all others. This is because the Earth is oblate, "fatter" around the equator where the other mines are, and more squat near Canada.
I am a Mining/Mechanical Project engineer and have had the extreme pleasure of visiting a lot of these underground operations (although Kidd is still on the bucket list!)
Due to precious and base metal prices as they are, there are a lot of mining deposits that were once not viable, but now seem quite profitable. There is a huge push to deeper levels and this is leading to some awesome engineering advances in the field (that I am proud to be a part of).
Mining is a market for hackers waiting to be tapped(!). This industry pushes two things, safety and efficiency. These mines work 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, any loss of work costs serious money. If you could develop software to have mines be both safer and more efficient, you have a signed pay check.
I'd be curious to know what kind of software systems are in place now? Googling turns up some pretty big players, like http://www.gemcomsoftware.com/, http://www.minesight.com/, etc. I interviewed once many years ago at Vale-Inco in Sudbury, Ontario and at the time they were still hiring Fortran developers.
Design software. Forget the scheduling and geology software, its managed by the big guys.
Every mining/mechanical engineer I know uses a collection of spreadsheets they have created/collated. It's cumbersome, its crap, its error prone.
* Materials Handling (Conveyor design etc.)
* Pumping (Dewatering, supply lines etc.)
Other areas which need serious shakeup are drawing and document control. There are junior miners starting every other week and if you can sell your software to them from the beginning to manage there document/drawing control you are set for at least 5-10 years of service/subscripton revenue as well.
One of my most memorable childhood trips was to the Soudan mine in Minnesota. It was only 2350 feet deep, but we got to ride down in a similar elevator and my ears popped. I'd never flown before, so it was a very foreign sensation. The mine itself was something both alien (complete darkness, solid rock) and cartoonish (cart on tracks).
Soudan Mine is really quite a sight, if you've never done a mine tour before. If you have any interest at all in the neutrino work happening at Fermilab, be sure to take the scientific tour as well as the tour of the mine proper.
If you're interested in mining, or big machines in general, consider attending the quad-annual MINExpo. The next one's in Las Vegas, Sept 2012 http://www.minexpo.com
You might want to read the guidelines again. Relevant things are "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Also, "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link."
I, for one, didn't know before reading this that the temperature gradient is so large, about 25C/km. Being someone who, if I had to guess, has never been more than a hundred metres underground or so, I assumed it was about an order of magnitude lower than that.
The new Case Middle School buildings at Punahou (my alma mater) use something like that, but on a smaller scale. They freeze water at night when electricity is cheaper and then use it for cooling during the day.
Why not, when the mine is done, install a bunch of turbines in the shaft and pour a bunch of water down to 4km, send the steam back up to the top and voila! Endless power.
The fun part is remembering most of geothermal power is derived from nuclear decay. So really, it's nuclear power!
Of course, really, in the end everything is nuclear power. Sunlight (solar panels) is a byproduct of nuclear activity. Fossil fuels are plants that grew by the light of the sun; wind is a result of heating of the atmosphere by the sun, and hydroelectric is a result of heating of the ocean by the sun.
(stretching, I know)... yet the power systems use something more than hydrogen and helium so are made of fusion byproducts from stars. ("We are all starstuff.")
I think a really important distinction is between things that are really interesting, and things that are "interesting" mostly because they confirm one's political beliefs. This article is just a random, interesting (or not, depending on your tastes) article that is not going to beget discussions involving taxes, the tea party, Obama, Ayn Rand, the Gold Standard, or any number of other discussions that have been done over and over and over and over again on the internet.
We manufacture underground production drills and have drills at every major underground mine in Canada and many of the other large underground mines around the world. We have equipment at Kidd Creek which is the deepest mine in Canada. When I first began to learn about the conditions underground the first thing that surprised me was the temperature in the mines. It's hot!
In some mines it's so hot that a human can't comfortably work for long, or at all. AngloGold Ashanti's TauTona mine in South Africa is sitting somewhere around 3.9km (Nearly 13,000 feet). The rock face in TauTona at its current depth reaches 60C. This is where it starts to get even more interesting for me. At these depths is hazardous for a human to work but there remains precious metals at greater depths. The technology to reach it and automate the extraction of these minerals is non-trivial and the current tech isn't advanced enough to reach it reliably. There are interesting problems that integrate software and heavy-duty hardware (30,000lb drills).