It is reassuring that the complex pilot plant operated at 100%...

It is reassuring that the complex pilot plant operated at 100% availability. Below is the home brew kit which kept the Ecobiome technicians sane, there being no other work to do. The stout is on the left and a feisty little double-hopped IPA on the right.


It would seem that this bioleaching bizzo is not creating gold and PGMs, it is liberating the refractories, the metals which are encapsulated in synroc and unavailable to the usual processes. I would have thought then that the bugs are actually eating the synroc and not the PGMs so the bugs should be called Ecobiome synroc-eating bugs rather than Ecobiome Metals Cultured Platinum Group Metals microbes. What is the point of tailoring bugs to eat PGMs when it is the rock which is to be eaten?



The process was run, the material from the tanks was collected and dried and samples were subsequently assayed. Were those samples taken from the dried solids? It seems to read that way. Now samples were taken at intermediate times in a process ran non-stop so how did they take those samples? Were the samples taken representative? Was the dried mass put through a riffle splitter to get the samples or were they just picked from a pile on the lab floor? You trumpeters are going to tell me that the initial sample was homogenised but was it still homogeneous after leaching? Were the samples taken before or after a night on the stout and IPA?

When samples were selected for ICP-MS and fire assay, what was the process? Was each sample selected then split, one half for Kamloops and the other for Lone Pine or were separate samples taken?

Nickel fusion appears not to work. It is not to sufficient to say it undercalls the grades therefore we will continue to use it. If it doesn't work, pissitoff!

In the end, show me the effects of this wonderful process on a series of polished sections which contain refractory metals and stop with the endless announcement of equivocal, uninterpretable results!