"I was under the impression that Kerr Addison had very good engineers. That mine was supposed to be running out in the 60s, but PDG was still taking gold out of it till the 90s - I believe. "
You were not wrong. They had better engineers on night shift than they have running companies today.
It was always running out. I figured that was just talk back in 1960. I remembed phoning them and asking them if that story about the downfaulted block was the truth, and wasn't it true they had lots of ore, but were just manipulating the stock price Hey I was 11 years old. I had the luck to be right that time. Ten years later I had 7 year plans with stope diagrams. One stope I worked, in, flow ore, me and another polish guy who later bought it in a raise, worked at 500 tons per day broken. true story. I asked joe teal the mining super for my thesis at haileybury could I get info on gold mining economics. He told me that it cost 1.50 a ton for mining our stope. He showed me the drilling. 10,000 tons at 0.095 opt. We recovered 1,050 ounces. I asked him was that just the breaking. Nope, he said (1977), that was drill, blast, develop, (raise bore), pull, tram and hoist to mill. The contained gold then was worth about 18 bucks a ton then. Costs $1.50 all up, before mill. Stopes were 50 feet wide. He gave me the plans. I looked at the end date. 1984. We have to shut down he said. Government will not give us air rights and water rights for 20,000 tons a day. I asked was the gold there. He said, yes, more than came out of the mine to date. How many holes? 300. That meant 10,000,000 ounces. What grade? Better than Kerr Main, but about 0.20 opt all is said and done. Trackless plan. 3 miles of tramming at 3800 (where we were working.) 2 drifts to guarantee return the same day. 300 million to do it then. 800 today. Basically liberal cabinet shut it down. They could not solve the slimes problem in the lake. suspended solids below one micron. I told them (Ramsay and Teal) I knew how to solve it. I knew about the SPM's but I thot sand filters would solve it if they were multi stage precipitative zeolites. I used it to get clay out of water. It may have worked. The slimes they were talking about never suspended and wer 0.5 microns or less. The only filter that will get them out on paper is the SPM. Today that is like falling off a log but few mining companies can even spell that.
They also said they could not get all the SO2 out. I told them I could do that. They asked me how. I told them catalytic. The told me it would not work. (Ramsay the mill super said that). They did not know. my eng prof was the guy who had the patent for SO2 V02 catalytic regenerative abatement since 1958. 99.97%. The CDN government would not bend, or believe his stories either. Some hoods tried to pressure him into giving up the patent rights or giving in on cost. They sold goverment that the SO2 abatement would not work and they could only get 60% by their methods of scrubbing, as they did not want to pay the patent. that is what the 60's and 70's propaganda about nothing works was all about. Patent rights and paying. Redesigning smelters and rebuilding which was necessary for main metal smelting would have been massively cheaper than what they ended up doing. Eventually all the paper plants in Canada ended up using his technology.
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