The competition committee placed two projects in second place and another project in third place, but was not able to find a proposal that was good enough to take first position.
The technical solutions proposed are to be used during the development of the resumption of mining.
Of the 33 projects from the second stage, just 10 made it to the final stage of the competition.
All projects were evaluated from the standpoint of their scientific and technical as well as technological validity, degree of readiness to be commissioned, compliance with the requirements of industrial safety for mining operations, feasibility at the existing modern level of development of industry and technology, economic efficiency, and the completeness of the proposed solution development.
"The basic concept of these technical solutions is to exclude the ingress of groundwater into existing mine workings of the Mir mine," said Andrey Cherepnov, Chief Engineer of ALROSA and deputy chairman of the competition committee. "In the opinion of the committee, the proposed solutions are the most acceptable from the viewpoint of safety of mining operations resumption on the Mir pipe and are the least expensive.
At the same time, none of the proposed solutions can be considered exhaustive, that is, solving the problem as a whole. As such, we did not award a first place [winner]. Our next task is to bring together the most successful technical solutions in order to propose a single concept for the resumption of mining operations based thereon."
Cherepnov said it be presented at a conference on April 25-26 in Moscow.
ALROSA will pay 1 million rubles ($160,000) to each team whose project took second place. The third place will be rewarded with 500,000 rubles. The other seven projects that made it to the final round will receive 100,000 rubles.
Operations at the Mir mine were halted after a tragedy that led to the deaths of eight miners.
