The accumulation of mine water in settling ponds, which is discharged due to coal mining, allows them to be cleaned out of suspension, and it is the reason for the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of tons of sediments. One interesting mineral enclosed in these sediments is barite, which is considered in the EU as a critical raw material, but it also contains radium originating from formation water. The effective barite separation and its beneficiation could constitute a win-win solution because then it would be possible to obtain the valuable radium concentrate for further processing, e.g., in nuclear medicine, and simultaneously to have an influence on cleaning bulk mass of sediments from radioactive contamination and allowing them to be recycled in the construction industry. Attempts to separate barite from mine water sediments were carried out using the flotation method based on varied amounts of reagents and adjustment of the pH of the ambient.
Makuła et al. (Thu,) studied this question.