It wasn’t until the development of a new technology, cyanide heap leach mining, in the late 1960s that interest in Zortman Landusky was reignited.
The cyanide heap leach process starts with blasting sections of a mountain into rubble. This rubble is then placed in a leach pad where it is soaked in a solution of cyanide, a highly toxic compound of carbon and nitrogen, that would sap the gold particles out of the rubble.
The cyanide solution was then sucked from the pad and taken to a processing plant where the gold was taken out at high purity. Then the solution was sent back to the pads for more gold.
In 1979 Pegasus Gold filed an Environmental Impact Statement with DEQ proposing to place these new leach pads on top of the old holy mountain.
http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12658&Itemid=1
No comments:
Post a Comment