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| The corrrect size pellets are moved through a large furnace or kiln where they get hard just like when pottery clay is fired in a kiln. The pellets then cool and are put on ships for transport to steel mills.
The energy for the plant is electricity produced at the plant by burning coal. In the photo below right a large 1000 plus foot ship is unloading coal that it picked up in Duluth harbor. The same kinds of ships often carry the taconite pellets to the steel mills. |
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| The waste rock needs to be dumped (disposed) somewhere. In the other iron mines the waste rock is simply piled up at the edges of the mine. Here it would be very expensive to ship the waste rock back to the mine. Reserve Mining used to dump the waste rock into Lake Superior but in the late 1970s it began constructing an on land disposal facility. Some of the land that forms Tetagouche State Park was involved in the trade of the state owned disposal site land and the mine owned land. The disposal site now is about 7 miles north of Silver Bay. The waste rock is pumped as a water slurry through pipes to the site where it is filtered and the water reused in the processing plant. The white color you see in the photo below is not snow but the wate rock in the collection basin. You might notice it is similar in color to the water slurry in the first photos inside the processing plant. | |
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