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dreaminofsailin

10/09/07 11:07 AM

#74335 RE: d indian #74321

There are several ways to extract the gold from the tailings piles. The easiest and cheapest is leaching with cyanide. You cover a huge area with plastic, the size of ten football fields say, then pile on as much tailings as possible. Next you set up a sprinkler system and spray cyanide over the pile for weeks at a time, constantly recovering the cyanide runoff and recovering the gold and recycling the cyanide. This system is outlawed in most places unless very strict guild lines are followed to make sure no cyanide makes it in to the ground.

From the video 2create provided, it looks as though they are crushing the tailings into powder and removing the gold with suds perhaps. Gold in powder form will ride on top of bubbles and the foam can be skimmed off and the gold removed. This is not as efficient as cyanide short term but can remove almost every molecule of gold if done properly.

Another method is shaker tables, but it would take hundreds of them years to do the piles we see in the video.

Aurus also has claimed “new” technology that runs the tailings past a radiation source that identifies when gold is present then diverts that part of the tailings to be processed while non gold bearing tailings are not processed. This would greatly reduce the time , energy, and money required to “get the gold”. This also could be what we saw in the video, it is hard to tell.

I am no expert but have worked tailing piles in Alaska as well as Georgia on a very small scale compared to what Aurus is doing.

DOS