There will be no shortage of backfill
They will be adding a "cement" to the tailings in the paste plant to produce backfill. This "cement" might actually be Portland cement but more likely flyash from coal fired power plants. Flyash costs $1.00 per ton at a power plant. The REEs are in PPMs (grams/tonne.) You can extract 200-400-600 PPM of whatever from a ton of ore and you still have 1990+ pounds of stuff. You will need to add cement. If you come up short add more flyash. It costs a buck a ton. Since the good stuff is in PPMs, I really doubt anyone is going to haul tons of ore to some off site location in order to extract grams of REEs. If they do, what are they going to do with the 99+% left over? If the tailings go anywhere it will be to a processing plant across the road owned by another company (then right back to Niocorp.) Would it be wise to send all this stuff back and forth across a paved state highway to the East? Probably not. Who owns the land immediately west across a gravel road? LaVonn Heideman! Who owns mineral and surface rights to this land? Niocorp! I am not a chemist but my understanding is after crushing, the recoverable minerals are leached out of the ore. The tailings are still tailings. They are not going anywhere. However, the leachate probably contains more useful stuff than Nb, Ti, and Sc.
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