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(Wallace Refiners) – Nornickel, the world’s largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel and a major producer of platinum and copper, announced Friday that on June 1, the company began to gradually restart ore mining at the Taimyrsky underground mine and plans to advance mine’s operations to full capacity in the near future.
Currently, the mine, which was temporarily suspended due to the flooding, has reached a daily mined volume of 5 kt, which is about 40% of the design capacity.
“Water from the horizons of the Taimyrsky mine has been pumped out. Today, our main goal is to reinforce the underground workings to ensure the safety of our employees. We will be gradually scaling up mining as we take these measures. The mine is expected to reach its design capacity of 12.1 kt per day by the end of June 2021,” said Nikolay Utkin, Senior Vice President of Norilsk Nickel and Head of the Norilsk Division.
As previously announced, the final stage of recovery operations at the Taimyrsky mine (4.3 mtpa of ore) is expected to be fully completed by the end of June.
The company said earlier that due to the flooding at Oktyabrsky and Taimyrsky mines, Nornickel’s metal production volumes are expected to fall short of the 2021 production guidance as follows: nickel — by approximately 35 kt, copper — by 65 kt and platinum groups metals — by 22 t (approximately 710 koz).
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