Abstract: Taking the tailings pond slope landfills near a substation engineering area as the research object, the representative profiles of the tailings pond slope landfills are selected and divided into four areas based on the topographic, geomorphological and geophysical data of the field survey, and the computational profile model of the tailings pond slope landfills and their basement is established. The extended finite element method is used to simulate the deformation characteristics of the tailings pond slope landfills under no rainfall and different rainfall intensities. The strength reduction method is used to get the safety factor of the landfills, and the stability of the tailings pond landfills and its risk to the substation engineering site are analyzed and evaluated. The results show that the strength reduction method can effectively obtain the potential slip surface of the slope, and it is feasible to use the displacement abrupt point at a specific position on the slope as the criterion of slope instability. The maximum safety factor of the tailings pond slope landfills under normal working conditions(no rainfall) is 1.35, which meets the basic requirements of the safety factor of slope engineering in the code. Under different rainfall intensities, the safety factor of the slope is between 1~1.22, and under the condition of 80mm·h^-1 heavy rainfall, the tailings pond slope landfills can still remain stable.