Pollution transfer and environmental risk assessment of waterborne heavy metals in tailings leakage areas under...

Tailings leakage caused by extreme rainfall not only results in direct economic losses but also poses a serious threat to environmental safety. Due to the concealment of tailings leakage, it often causes irreversible environmental pollution even when discovered. After a leak occurs, the environmental protection department usually installs additional monitoring points along the pollution transfer route to monitor the pollutants. Although this approach can accurately monitor pollution levels in the area, it lacks forward-looking capabilities and cannot adequately support the dynamic assessment of pollutant transfer. This study has established a comprehensive framework for the transfer and risk assessment of heavy metal (HM) pollution in rivers. Compared with traditional monitoring methods, the framework proposed in this study has strong applicability under limited monitoring data conditions and can capture the main spatial-temporal trends. Based on this framework, using the June 2025 leakage from the RongShui Jialong Mine in China as a case study, the dynamic and spatiotemporal distributions of HMs such as Sb, As, Cu, and Ag in the river were simulated. The statistical analysis based on the determination and simulation data indicates that the NSE metrics for HMs are all greater than 0.5, and the RSR metrics are all less than 0.7. The risk assessment results indicate that the Carcinogenic Risk (P50) of As is as high as 2.49 × 10^-3.