From: Nina & Paul <ninablan@home.com>
Organization: @Home Network
Newsgroups: sci.physics.plasma
Subject: Re: Using plasma to refine gold
References: <961hdi$apj2$1@saturn.cs.uml.edu>


Hi Tom,

I have know idea if what I've done is of any interest to you, or even
answers you question. So if I'm simply babbling here, forgive me.

But in the event it's something of interest and it can help you here
goes and please feel free to get in touch.

I've had al kinds of success using home made (made in our R&D fab shop),
electric arc plasma torches.

I wanted to attempt to produce precious metals from the bottom ash from
coal fired powerplants, simply as an intelectual curiosity I had.

A number of years ago when I was in Poland on looking at devising a
solution for that countries cronic problem with leatchates from billions
of tons of coal tailings from their coal fired powerplants.

At that time I was exposed to the concept one of their country's
brillant chemists referred to as "electron splicing".

I'm not a chemist, nor do I have any professional or academic background
in physics or any of the sciences. I operate 100% from extrapolating
things and have an uncanny ability to marry concepts across dicsiplines.
So if we get into a diologue please don't get too technical on me.

All I can tell you is, that once I had the chance to play with some of
my theories, electron splicing is a piece of cake. You could preety well
"create" just about anything you wanted. Like Captian Pacard on Star
Trek. Computer! Earl Gray Tea please.... right out of the periodic table
of elements. We haven't made any tea, or cup or saucer, but what we have
made convinces me that it's possible once the processers are capable of
making the selection from the elements and knowing what one to use as
the host and from which others to tranfer the electrons from.

To recover or create precious metals from incinerator ash really isn't a
big leap. Coal burned leaves behind higiher grade carbon we found to be
above C14. This really became a nice carrier for the other electrons we
build with.

You may have heard that last Saturday, some Italian metallurgy
scientists, announced to the media with great fan fair, that they had
made gold in their lab from some undisclosed dust!

They were hoping(?) (what's to hope for, it's as easy as making bronze),
to commercialize their process by 2005. Their biggest hurdle will be all
of the major corporations holding billions of their companies dollars in
gold certificates that will go into the toilet if gold becomes as comon
place as tin.

Most people don't know this, but I heard that Nazi physicist were making
"K" gold, which is for lack of a better term, artificial gold, that had
no detectable differences from "real" gold, way back in the 30's. And
this was how they financed their insanity. When Berlin fell to the
Russian's the western allies were concerned they'd get the formula for
making gold. Well they probably did but got even smarter for not dumping
gold and went into metal production of really valuable industrial,
arospace alloys way faster then the US metallurical guys which was what
gave them the space advantage.

Also Russian physicist have been "making" palladium for more then 30 or
so years. When I was in Poland i met guys who had worked in the precious
metal plants as chemists back when Russia ruled the East Block nations.
These guys said there wasn't one ounce of ore ever used in any of their
metallurgical refinment processes. when I asked how they did it, they
would make vage refrences to electron splicing or 'doping" technolies
they'd developed using high energy physics processes.

Most people in North America have no idea that Russian palladium brokers
supply North American auto makers with 90% of all the palladium they use
in the catalytic converts in their exhaust systems. Yet russia has very
little palladium ore deposits. Actuall last year the NA auto industry
used more palladium then all of the known ore reserves in the WORLD with
even greater demands yet to come right out of NA, yet the price
Russian's are getting from NA for a man made metal is well over $800 an
ounce.

When people realize any of these metals, in fact EVERY metal we as a
planet will ever require can be easily produced, as easy as making any
flavor of cake ones heart craves!

So Tom, if you're going to invest in recovering or "making" precious
metals for profit, my comment would be to get out of the junk priced
US$260 an once metals like gold, even by-pass paladium at US$800 an
ounce, and go right into the real money metal, iridium, selling at a
whopping US$1,700 an ounce!!! any day of the week.

Palladium's a good patriotic option to break the ruskies cartel if you
want to risk getting blown away by their mafia, I'd stick to making one
or two ounces of iriduim a week and pull in a cool US$2500 before tax,
after broker fees.

Rummer has it, that the demand for palladium will drive it's price to
over US$8,000 an ounce over the next 5 years due to the fact that SUV's
are being reclassified from the light truck class into the passenger
vehicle classification thus requiring them to have pollution control
systems they currently don't require.

By the way, we made our own 6 kw torches for around $1500 a pop. These
aren't toys even though their physical size is not any bigger then a
small flashlight that has 3 C size batteries, but man they're HOT
puppies! - with operating temperatures well over 5800 degrees F. We
didn't know at first becuaee our eltronic infra red thermoscanner only
went up to 1500C and then would just shut off.

We only know the temp. to be more then 5800F because we were sublimating
our graphite crucibles, and the graphite plugs we purchased to make our
crucibles was engineered to with stand 5800 degrees F.

They would vaporize like they were made out of ice water! In less then 5
minutes they would sublimate down from 5/8" thick walls to less then
1/16" making them too thin to even pickup with our tongs.

Our reactor walls where the crucible was placed to do the vaporizing
would be translucent cherry molten plasticized glass. We lined our
reactor with the hottest refractory brick we could find (and afford),
and they still would turn to a molten plastic material in about 7 to 10
minutes of turning on our three torches.

Our reactor body, torche bodies and electrodes were being constantly
cooled with de-ionized water.

We operated this equipment from our shop electic service, drawing a
total of only 28 Kwh. when we started playing with idea, we had no idea
how energy efficient our torhc design would be. for example w've got a
commercial heavy duty electric heat gun that we use for melting wax
casting cores our of molds. This needs to get the mold hot pretty quick
and by industry standards it's considered a "serious" piece of hand held
electric heating that draws 18 kWh. now it doesn't get over 1800 degrees
F. we take just two of our tiny torches that draw 12 Kwh and we still
get over 6000 F in operating temperature. i've held one in my hand while
it was operating and it had an electric flame extending beyond the
nozzel about 18 inches that lite up our 18,000 square foot shop like
UI'd opened the doors to let in the noon day sun!

What's really neat about playing with high energy plasma, is that it's
really a kind of creation process. For example, we'd start with LESS and
end up with MORE. In the first two or three experiments we did, we'd
think that we were so excited with getting a batch into the crucible to
see what we culd make, and thus we weren't watching our measures very
well, because the dollop of metal we'd get out from the slag after we
dumped in the ash cocktail, always weighed more then the total mix we
would dump into the crucible at the begining of the experiment!!

Our standard mix end up up being 48 grams of blends of ash and other
minerals and we always ended up with around 57 grams of precious metals.
These dollops would be a blend of silver, gold, platinum, palladium,
iridium as well as some other metals. We don't have any explination
where the extra weight came from because we still haven't accepted the
idea that you can get something from nothing.

But then ideas come from nothing, so why couldn't matter if the right
conditions existing? Because ideas need an ideal host before they exist,
at least that's how I justify my pay cheque each week!!

The bottom line is this, at the elevated temperatures of plasma where
solids go beyond the liquid phase into a gas phase you get electron
transference and your metals come together.

We used coal ash for the carbon above C14 as our base or host, then
played with cheap available elements that had the electrons we'd need to
dope our carbon with. And that's it.

Plasma simply gave us speed. Guys are doing this in convection ovens and
take hours and a lot more horsepower to get the high temperatures that
we got the second we fired our plasma torches on. That's the nice thing
about plasma, they are 6,000 degrees right away.

Currently we're not doing anything with this process as a matter of fact
we totally dismantled the equipment and have moved on to "play" with
other things.

Feel free to write back.

Regards,

Paul Blanshard
"Tom Milam, Jr." wrote:
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts or literature on using plasma to oxidize
> sulfide concentrates for the recovery of gold and silver?
>
> Thanks,
>
> /s/ Tom Milam, Jr.
>
> -----
> Tom Milam, Jr.
> The Inglesrud Corporation
> P. O. Box 18759
> Oklahoma City, OK 73154
> Telephone: (405) 843-7389
> Facsimile: (405) 843-0351
> Internet: milam@ionet.net
> Hard rock mining - Honduras
> Web Page: www.inglesrud.com
> -----