At Pueblo Viejo, there are no picks, shovels, or wheelbarrows. Instead, workers use explosives to break the rock wall of the pit into chunks. Massive trucks carry the boulders to a series of crushers that break the rock down into baseball-sized pieces, and later, into dust. The dust is mixed with water from a nearby river to create a sort of sludge, which passes through a dizzying set of tubes, tanks, and machines, each step helping isolate specks of gold dust from the millions of tons of ore where they’re lodged. Cyanide is mixed in to help loosen the gold particles; then it’s removed in one of four giant pressure cookers. The leftover rock sludge is piped to a dumping area nearby. If all goes well, this process will yield nearly one million ounces of gold each year at Pueblo Viejo—enough, if melted into standard gold bars, to fill a Mini Cooper.
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/haitis-gold-rush/
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