What's the most cost effective chemical extraction process? For sulfides

Ragnor

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Dec 7, 2015
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I have been doing allot of studying on chemical extraction methods and what have you and there are sure a bunch out there. But the thing I see over and over is people losing money on they're extractions of gold scrap. Very few people are working on actual ores, they are re-refining and still losing money. That ain't no good. I know cyanide is the leach of choice for the big companies , but the more I read on the recovery end the more complicated it starts sounding. I would like to avoid building a smelter if possible. I have the space for it, but still it leads to all kinds of complications with toxicity and what have you.

So I figured I'd ask on here and see what folks have to say.

Other problems Ive been running into is that most of your various plastics are vulnerable to attack by various acids and compounds depending on what kind of leach you are running.
Then quartz tubes large enough to run any kind of batching are pretty darned costly. So that makes things more complicated also.

My basic idea is to crush the ore and then concentrate it on a miller table or something along those lines. Building a jig really doesn't seam like it should be to complicated either, just a matter of tuning and understanding frequency and harmonics is kind of my thing. I also have no shortage of water to contend with.

Another problem I run into is my goals are non specific. I could be working with copper ores, stibinite/tungsten, tin/nickle/lead, maybe even uranium. Depending on the area I collect my rocks. So while I am always after gold most of that gold is mixed with other commodities due to the nature of the geology in my area. I certainly would not want to toss out PGM's with the wash.

So anyway....... That's something Ive been trying to figure out.

Ah, the last important aspect is that this is all fairly small scale. My goal is high-grading, not mass production. So I realistically only have the capability to process maybe a couple of truck loads a year unless I happen to find a spot with everything just right. An old timer did once tell me he knew a spot we could blast the hill right into the bed of the truck. But he went and died before he was able to show me.
 

SaltwaterServr

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Mar 20, 2015
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I'll put more up later, but suffice it to say, your list of ore types is a HUGE pain in the ***. If you end up with measurable trace uranium in your concentrates, and you try to process that with any kind of environmental discharge you'll end up in prison.
 

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Ragnor

Ragnor

Sr. Member
Dec 7, 2015
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You know that's kind of funny. I'd never really thought about the uranium being a problem. Kind of weird how people can vacation in a place with 53x background radiation and be blissfully unaware of it. But if you bring it home and process it then it becomes a problem. It's good to know though. I'll take that into consideration.
 

Mad Machinist

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Aug 18, 2010
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Ragnar,

Take a look through the forum here and read up on what SaltwaterServr and I have been working on. Bioleaching is turning out to be a very serious possibility although the initial outlay of capital is high.

With the jig, the biggest thing is to make sure your ragging has a specific gravity between what your trying to recover and the rest of the stuff.
 

SaltwaterServr

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Mar 20, 2015
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I was thinking about biox for him but with the variation in his feed ore, the bugs will never acclimate effectively.
 

solarsmith

Jr. Member
Mar 27, 2016
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Denver
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with what ever method you use. you will have to grind to minus 200 for a start. a friend has been having very good luck using a shaker table on his 80% passing 200. hard rock put through a flail hammer mill. then to the table. then to the micro wave for a lead prill and microwave one more time on a cupel resulting in a pgm bead. then collects all the beads melts them and pours a bar. Bryan in Denver Colorado
 

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