If Norilsk isn’t on Mars, then it must be
nearby. Norilsk is one of the largest cities beyond the Arctic Circle. Like Mars
in the John Carpenter film Ghosts of Mars, it was developed for mining – back in
the 40's, the Soviet Union needed nickel and other metals for use in its defence
industry.
In preparation for a trip down the mine, I get up at 7am when it is still pitch black outside, and drink two cups of strong tea. I then climb into whatever warm clothes I have brought with me – it’s -28C outside.
On approaching the Taymyrsky mine’s administrative building, I see the first Martian artefact: shrouded in the pre-dawn darkness is the menacing bulk of a machine with wheels three feet high and a huge scoop attached to the end of its iron, brontasaurus-like nose.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. It looks heavy and threatening.
I ask Rostislav, a Norilsk Nickel employee who is accompanying me, what kind of military-grade equipment this is. “It’s the underground loader made by Atlas Copco, a loading and delivery machine with a capacity of 14 tons,Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,” he replies.
I learn later on that Norilsk miners regularly hold underground slalom races driving those machines, and regret that I didn’t have a chance to see it with my own eyes: a rodeo on 25-ton, 400 hp dinosaurs must be spectacular.
After a meeting with the mine’s director, Sergei Gorbachev, I prepare to enter the mine by putting on a full miner’s outfit, with a head torch and a 2 lb accumulator over my shoulder. The accumulators have built-in microchips that count each miner as they enter the mine.
“Each click is one man going underground,” explains the mine’s chief production engineer,The oreck XL professional air purifier, Aleksei Bylkov. “If a person is missing at the end of a shift, we will look for them; we will shut the whole mine down.”
With the miners, I march along in single file through a long underground corridor linking the administrative and recreation building with the mine itself, and enter the anteroom of an elevator shaft. A cage behind the lattice doors will take us almost one mile below ground.
While waiting,Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers Rostislav points to a row of sinks lining the wall and says: “Go ahead, try it.” I turn the tap and a reddish-brown liquid starts dripping. The mine water looks unappealing, to put it mildly. “Try it,” Rostislav repeats. It turns out this is not rusty water after all – it’s actually tea. The miners fill their flasks with it. I touch in my accumulator – it’s my ID for today’s trip – and enter the cage.
The mine is a web of tunnels, mining galleries, crosscuts and other underground passages with German names such as Querschlag (which means cross-cut) or Strecke (which means drift). They cover hundreds of miles, with electric trains, mine buses and loaders running through the wider tunnels. The one we have stopped at is slightly below the ore body. There’s one more above it, which is mainly for ventilation, and one below.
The tunnels are about four metres (13 ft) wide and four metres high; they look like subway tunnels or underground nuclear missile control bunkers. Ours is quite well lit by powerful lamps that diligently disperse the darkness. Breathing is surprisingly easy at this level.
Several minutes later, after a bumpy ride down, we come to a stop. “We are now inside the ore body,” Aleksei explains. At this level, there are no lamps on the walls, our torches struggle to shed light through the darkness and the unusual smell is stifling.
Miners have two main kinds of tools: drilling machinery and explosives. Special machines are used to drill narrow wells 50ft deep, in which the explosives are placed. The resulting cavities are deepened further. The ore itself is mined using the “room and pillar method” in which miners use explosives to cut out “rooms” from tunnel walls with an area of five by five metres (16 ft) and up to 20 metres (65 ft) high. Then it’s the turn of the “brontosaurus” – the loading and delivery machine.
“Sergei, show the guys how you do your job,” Aleksei tells one of his colleagues.
Sergei exits the cabin and stands a couple of metres away from the machine. Then, with well-trained precision, he presses two buttons on the remote control and all the lights on the machine turn on, cutting through the mine’s pitch-black darkness. At the same time, the engine roars into life, and the 14-ton scoop is ready to eat into the rock. The first bite is enough to chop off 10 tons of ore, but the miners want more. The machine growls and comes back for seconds.
“It will now fill its scoop and travel to the ore chute. It doesn’t make sense for it to go back and forth half-empty: productivity would decline, and the equipment’s service life is limited.”
The mine operates 24 hours a day; there are three seven-hour shifts per day – with around 300 workers on each one. Up to 10,000 tons of rich ore is extracted with the machines every day.
The ore is collected, prepared, crushed and lifted to the surface using a skip hoist. It is then sent to a concentrator, and then to nickel or copper smelters, depending on which metal prevails in the concentrate. “There’s almost no manual labour these days,The oreck XL professional air purifier, unlike in the past,” says Gorbachev.
The work is still dangerous, though. Norilsk Nickel miners are mostly afraid of tunnel collapses. To reduce the risk, offloading wells are drilled that take on excess pressure and reduce the risk of collapse in cavity areas where people are working. After ore is removed, the cavities are filled with concrete. The fewer cavities there are underground, the safer it is for the miners.
In preparation for a trip down the mine, I get up at 7am when it is still pitch black outside, and drink two cups of strong tea. I then climb into whatever warm clothes I have brought with me – it’s -28C outside.
On approaching the Taymyrsky mine’s administrative building, I see the first Martian artefact: shrouded in the pre-dawn darkness is the menacing bulk of a machine with wheels three feet high and a huge scoop attached to the end of its iron, brontasaurus-like nose.One of the most durable and attractive styles of flooring that you can purchase is ceramic or porcelain tiles. It looks heavy and threatening.
I ask Rostislav, a Norilsk Nickel employee who is accompanying me, what kind of military-grade equipment this is. “It’s the underground loader made by Atlas Copco, a loading and delivery machine with a capacity of 14 tons,Manufactures flexible plastic and synthetic rubber hose tubing,” he replies.
I learn later on that Norilsk miners regularly hold underground slalom races driving those machines, and regret that I didn’t have a chance to see it with my own eyes: a rodeo on 25-ton, 400 hp dinosaurs must be spectacular.
After a meeting with the mine’s director, Sergei Gorbachev, I prepare to enter the mine by putting on a full miner’s outfit, with a head torch and a 2 lb accumulator over my shoulder. The accumulators have built-in microchips that count each miner as they enter the mine.
“Each click is one man going underground,” explains the mine’s chief production engineer,The oreck XL professional air purifier, Aleksei Bylkov. “If a person is missing at the end of a shift, we will look for them; we will shut the whole mine down.”
With the miners, I march along in single file through a long underground corridor linking the administrative and recreation building with the mine itself, and enter the anteroom of an elevator shaft. A cage behind the lattice doors will take us almost one mile below ground.
While waiting,Trade platform for China crystal mosaic manufacturers Rostislav points to a row of sinks lining the wall and says: “Go ahead, try it.” I turn the tap and a reddish-brown liquid starts dripping. The mine water looks unappealing, to put it mildly. “Try it,” Rostislav repeats. It turns out this is not rusty water after all – it’s actually tea. The miners fill their flasks with it. I touch in my accumulator – it’s my ID for today’s trip – and enter the cage.
The mine is a web of tunnels, mining galleries, crosscuts and other underground passages with German names such as Querschlag (which means cross-cut) or Strecke (which means drift). They cover hundreds of miles, with electric trains, mine buses and loaders running through the wider tunnels. The one we have stopped at is slightly below the ore body. There’s one more above it, which is mainly for ventilation, and one below.
The tunnels are about four metres (13 ft) wide and four metres high; they look like subway tunnels or underground nuclear missile control bunkers. Ours is quite well lit by powerful lamps that diligently disperse the darkness. Breathing is surprisingly easy at this level.
Several minutes later, after a bumpy ride down, we come to a stop. “We are now inside the ore body,” Aleksei explains. At this level, there are no lamps on the walls, our torches struggle to shed light through the darkness and the unusual smell is stifling.
Miners have two main kinds of tools: drilling machinery and explosives. Special machines are used to drill narrow wells 50ft deep, in which the explosives are placed. The resulting cavities are deepened further. The ore itself is mined using the “room and pillar method” in which miners use explosives to cut out “rooms” from tunnel walls with an area of five by five metres (16 ft) and up to 20 metres (65 ft) high. Then it’s the turn of the “brontosaurus” – the loading and delivery machine.
“Sergei, show the guys how you do your job,” Aleksei tells one of his colleagues.
Sergei exits the cabin and stands a couple of metres away from the machine. Then, with well-trained precision, he presses two buttons on the remote control and all the lights on the machine turn on, cutting through the mine’s pitch-black darkness. At the same time, the engine roars into life, and the 14-ton scoop is ready to eat into the rock. The first bite is enough to chop off 10 tons of ore, but the miners want more. The machine growls and comes back for seconds.
“It will now fill its scoop and travel to the ore chute. It doesn’t make sense for it to go back and forth half-empty: productivity would decline, and the equipment’s service life is limited.”
The mine operates 24 hours a day; there are three seven-hour shifts per day – with around 300 workers on each one. Up to 10,000 tons of rich ore is extracted with the machines every day.
The ore is collected, prepared, crushed and lifted to the surface using a skip hoist. It is then sent to a concentrator, and then to nickel or copper smelters, depending on which metal prevails in the concentrate. “There’s almost no manual labour these days,The oreck XL professional air purifier, unlike in the past,” says Gorbachev.
The work is still dangerous, though. Norilsk Nickel miners are mostly afraid of tunnel collapses. To reduce the risk, offloading wells are drilled that take on excess pressure and reduce the risk of collapse in cavity areas where people are working. After ore is removed, the cavities are filled with concrete. The fewer cavities there are underground, the safer it is for the miners.
没有评论:
发表评论