It's the sheer enormity :) of mining 12 million yards a year from one location that is unrealistic. Normal season days up there are about 120. That is 100,000 yards per day. With unit haulage being more or less fixed because you cannot go too big in that sort of ground, it means multiplying shovels, trucks and recovery equipment until you reach the yardage. The economics therefore does not improve that much with really really big scale. It is impossible to use one heading, so several pits would be necessary. Again, no scale improvements here. The best a 5 yard shovel could move flat-out is about 22,000 yards per 12 hour day. You would probably need 4 - 100 tonne belly dumps to keep up with the shovel. No way you could actually load that much material into trucks in one day. 15,000 is more like it - and you would need a biggie loader too. That is only about 2.5 million worth of equipment not counting ancillaries and recovery equip.
To put it into proper perspective, My Aulde Yukon Consolidated used to mine 5 million yards per year, but they did it with 5 bucket wheel dredges at 5 different locations. And bucket wheels have shovels and trucks beat for cash cost, capex and throughput.
I think they are in for a time trying to permit this kind of operation, at that scale. On the other hand if they tried for say 5000 yards a day, they might be able to make money and finance the larger op later. Again, you cannot grow a 12 million yard op out of a 1 million yard op as they probably won't make a million per year, so they will have to refinance to grow.. if it makes sense.
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