CompuServe Messages

Hi, Bruce– It occurs to me that if I wanted to come up with a swindle, I would have a ore sample from somewhere else analyzed and report those numbers (and maybe salt the mine with such samples), or crib the numbers from some report from another mine – either way I would not come up with such weird numbers unless I happened to grab a sample from that northern Urals area. They seem _almost_ too weird to be anything but honest. If it is a scam, the perpetrators are either clumsy or think many people will figure as I just did. The need for a "secret process" is the real joker here. If gravity separation were always economical, there would be little heap leaching of gold; I do not know how close those concentrations were to the limit where gravity separation makes sense (the price of osmium and iridium would be critical in this case, with those numbers). Then there is the problem of isolating Pt from Au and whatnot (if cyanide works for Au and not Pt, why not use it here?). I wonder how profitable this proposition would be if the secret process had to be replaced with traditional practice? –Doug