General discussion, page-7731

@jcmyck ... "I haven't seen anything about this additional processing effort with respect to thorium"

A while ago I did a lot of research on everything I could find about Araxa. Came across a document that mentioned the high thorium levels were not an issue really early on with their production of ferroniobium, but customers became increasingly more concerned with the high levels, so they had to introduce processes to reduce the thorium levels in their product. This was fairly early on, possibly back in the '60's or early '70's.

This morning I just did a quick search looking for anything that showed the 0.12% thorium levels. It would take a lot longer to find the paper that mentioned the processes they employed. I've done it once and satisfied myself at the time. It's out there somewhere, but I'm not going to relook for it. It might have turned up under a search of something like 'processing history of Araxa niobium' in the search or something similar. I spent a lot of time reading everything I could find about Araxa to satisfy my curiosity that we did indeed have something very valuable.

I can remember reading about it, but didn't think it was important enough at the time to record the link, I just remembered the thorium levels were easy to find. (For them if thorium reactors take off they might have a great by product that we don't have!).