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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richnorth who wrote (82753)	3/2/2002 6:34:09 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116791

To get nitric acid, you have to get nitre into solution in sufficient quantities, which it will not do by dissolving in water. If you mix pyrite with knitre and water it will form sulfuric and take the nitre into solution to make a mixture of sulfurous and nitric. Nitric will gasify though. It may help to add some battery acid to get the reaction started or heat the pyrite strongly in the presence of nitre. (not too strongly and don't stand near.) I wasn't thinking of the stoichiometry of the reaction just my experiences reducing sulphide with such a solution. It would appear that the sulfuric formed adds a proton to the nitre to get nitric and in turn is reduced. It might help to use sodium nitrate to get this going. You should do this with your vessel in an vegetable oil bath as a moderator of heating. If you do it in a large glass pot and use a curved glass lid upside down and spaced on top, and suspend from the upside down lid a beaker, the fumes will condense on the lid and land in the beaker in theory. If you added HCl to the solution it might lock the nitric as aqua regia. Don't say the miners couldn't do this. They used to distil alcohol in the same way. Kids, don't do this at home. It needs good ventilation and care to avoid explosions. EC<:-}