Tailings facilities cannot be fully verified at commissioning. They are built incrementally over decades, and their geometry, stress state, drainage pathways, and risk profile change as they grow. Defensible Tailings Engineering offers a technically rigorous framework for designing, evaluating, and managing these facilities under conditions of unavoidable uncertainty.

The book begins with the mechanics of tailings behavior (hydraulic deposition, consolidation, drainage evolution, stress paths, foundation response, and failure mechanisms) and builds toward performance confirmation, analytical proportionality, and explicit uncertainty management. Its contribution is not new design formulas but the integration of geotechnical mechanics with engineering decision logic: how to interpret monitoring data, recognize when assumptions no longer hold, decide when analytical escalation is warranted, and select proportionate risk-reduction measures. It also addresses who holds the authority to decide what level of risk is acceptable, and how those decisions are communicated and defended. Synthesis tables, case-based appendices, and decision frameworks connect analysis, observation, and action in real operating environments.

Written for practicing engineers, Engineers of Record, independent review boards, regulators, and technical leaders who must justify decisions under scrutiny, the book gives readers both deeper technical understanding and a disciplined way to remain defensible across a facility's full lifecycle, through changing conditions, evolving standards, and retrospective evaluation after incidents. Where consequences are high and certainty is unattainable, it offers a coherent method for remaining technically sound, proportionate, and accountable over time.

Priscilla Nelson was the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, New Jersey from May 2005 to November 2008. She was also the past president of the GeoInstitute of ASCE. She is currently the Department Head and Professor, Department of Mining Engineering, Colorado School of Mines.