7
Conclusions.
Based on its review of the draft report of the DOE Working Group, the NRC committee concluded the following:
- Most U.S. mines will be not be “visible” to the CTBT monitoring system.
- Most large U.S. mines have optimized their operations in order to remain competitive and could be adversely affected economically by the suggested changes in blasting practices or re-engineering of mine designs proposed in the DOE Working Group report.
- The CTBT monitoring system would benefit greatly from the voluntary participation of “visible” mines in a few, simple, cooperative measures that would have little or no impact on mining operations and could, in some cases, improve blasting efficiency or mine safety.
- A stepwise approach (drawing from the DOE Working Group report), beginning with simple communications between mine operators and government seismologists, would be adequate to address most of the problems of event ambiguity in CTBT monitoring. If not, then it may be necessary to employ active mine monitoring techniques for those mine operations that produce problematic seismic signals.
- A voluntary approach that results in decreasing the visibility or ambiguity of seismic signals originating from mining operations would also benefit the United States by setting a positive example for other countries to participate in confidence-building measures under the treaty regime.
- It is likely that an effective voluntary program would be acceptable to the mining industry, and could therefore be fully implemented soon after the entry into force of the CTBT.
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