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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hubris33 who wrote (8909)	4/6/2006 11:25:57 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78416

I have known about the thiosulfate process for a while. It has been tried in Ontario I believe. There is some reason why it is not routinely employed. In fact cyanide although a deadly poison is for the most part routinely used in industry with little hazard and has not caused serious incident in Canada in a 100 years. It disappears to rapidly from effluent that it has never been a major concern in the concentrations used by most gold mines. It is the last thing one will get hassled about in a tailings pond permit. Down stream of any tailings pond in Canada it is impossible to get any cyanide detection of consequence. The overseas spills recently that poisoned large areas where remarkable in how quickly the high concentrations dissipated and how little threat they ended up being to human life. Almost vanishingly small in both cases. In the Romanian case we don't have any stories of a single person getting any effect from the spill. Initially within the first 48 hours the spills had spread a very high concentration of dangerous amounts of poison. But very quickly thereafter the amounts downstream had subsided to non hazardous levels. It would appear that in fact the most singular effect of the chemical is that it has natural tendency to dissipate and alleviate any hazard. I would not say that environmental damage was low for all species, but man could avoid trouble rather easily. 80% of the cyanide used in industry today is employed by the metal plating industry which takes place mostly in built up areas. The effluent poison is killed quite easily by chlorine and thiosulfate and goes down the drain in cities. Gun blueing and case hardening all use cyanide gas. Gold mining uses a minor amount relatively and in relatively low concentrations. Chemicals used in industry that have more fundamental danger, are longer term slow break down poisons and have more complex toxic effects are legion. If we are to concentrate on making chemical industry more safe, then there are 100's of things to look at before we consider cyanide. Perhaps the more insidious poisons in our environment we used to kill insects could be examined. EC<:-}