cyanide process cyanide process or cyanidation, method for extracting gold from its ore.

The ore is first finely ground and may be concentrated by flotation; if it contains certain impurities, it may be roasted. It is then mixed with a dilute solution of sodium cyanide (or potassium or calcium cyanide) while air is bubbled through it. The gold is oxidized and forms the soluble aurocyanide complex ion, Au(CN)2 - 1. (Silver, usually present as an impurity, forms a similar soluble ion.) The solution is separated from the ore by methods such as filtration, and the gold is precipitated by adding powdered zinc. The precipitate usually contains silver, which is also precipitated, and unreacted zinc. The precipitate is further refined, e.g., by smelting to remove the zinc and by treating with nitric acid to dissolve the silver. The cyanide process was developed (1887) by J. S. MacArthur and others in Glasgow, Scotland. It is now the most important and widely used process for extracting gold from ores.

Gold Mining with Cyanide REPORT ON I-147 Repeal of the Ban on Cyanide Heap Leaching in Gold Mining WHAT IS CYANIDE AND WHAT DOES IT DO IN THE ENVIRONMENT Cyanide is a general term, referring to various specific cyanide compounds. of carbon and nitrogen. Despite often-heard references to pure cyanide, it actually exists only as an anion, so is only a component of other compounds. Even though cyanide is a poison, trace amounts of cyanide compounds occur naturally in our bodies and in many foods. Even over a lifetime of exposure, trace amounts pose no threat to human health. Cyanide does not build up in the body. The liver removes it. As one might expect, cyanide compounds are used in certain herbicides. But some common drugsincluding the pain reliever ibuprofen and the anti-inflammatory agent naproxenalso contain cyanide compounds, or are derived directly from them. Today, U.S. chemical manufacturing industries consume more than 10 times the amount of cyanide compounds than are used in domestic gold mining to manufacture products like nylon and other polyamides, acrylics and certain plastics. Cyanide compounds are also used to harden steel and to electroplate copper and precious metals. Cyanide heap leach solutions are very alkaline because at a ph of 8 or below CN vaporizes into the air. In the air, the poison is quickly dispersed and would only be dangerous in a very small area close to the vaporizing solution. Therefore if these solutions do escape into surface water, they will be diluted by the lower ph surface water and soon dissipate into the air, becoming harmless. Other natural elements including sunlight also degrade cyanide into harmless compounds: Various species of bacteria, fungi, algae, yeasts and plants, along with their associated enzymes and amino acids, are known to oxidize cyanide

naturally.[i]HOW DOES CYANIDE LEACHING WORK A weak solution containing a quantity of sodium cyanide (0.015 percent average) is percolated over crushed ore to dissolve the gold. The leach solutions are carefully buffered with an alkali (usually lime) to prevent the possible generation of hazardous hydrogen cyanide gas. The gold bearing solution is collected and the gold removed. The leaching solution is then reused. The whole process takes place on top of an impermeable, double or triple layered liner to collect all of the valuable gold and prevent the escape of dangerous CN. POLITICAL HISTORY OF CYANIDE LEACHING In 1996, environmental groups headed by MEIC from Missoula launched an attack on mining through the initiative process. Miners defended their industry and I-122 was defeated. A great deal of out of state money was spent on this campaign by both sides. There was another ballot issue that year: I-125, sponsored by MontPIRG which is a Nader group that percolated up from the Univerity of Montana campus at Missoula. I-125 prevented businesses spending ANY money to defend themselves against ballot issues. In the heated battle over I-122, this seemingly innocuous ballot issue was overlooked by business and the public. I-125 did not put any limitations on spending by non-profit groups on Montana ballot issues. I-125 passed in 1996. After the passage of the business spending ban, I-125, MEIC decided that they had a good chance to pass an anti-mining bill in the next election because the miners could not fight back. They said as much on their website. This time they sensationalized the issue by concentrating on cyanide. Just two weeks before the election the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the ban on business spending in ballot issue elections was unconstitutional but it was too late for the miners to mount an effective defense. I-137 passed in 1998. No other state in America bans the use of cyanide in mining. BENEFITS Mining in Montana has rapidly declined in recent years due to the regulatory climate in the state. Since cyanide leaching is the only economic means of recovering many of Montanas most important gold and silver deposits, repealing the cyanide ban will go a long way towards improving that climate thus helping to diversify our economy. Canyon Resources lists the economic losses to Montana from the passage of the cyanide ban just related for their projects alone. The imposition of I -137, with its total ban on the use of the only economically viable technology to recover gold and silver from the McDonald and Seven-Up Pete deposits, has deprived the citizens of Montana, local communities and their workers, and the State of Montana of the following otherwise available assets: a. Royalty payments of more than $89 million ($6,357,142 annually for 14 years) to the State School Trust System, primarily designated for Montana

Tech b. Long-term jobs at wages approximately twice the current average income in Montana c. Severance and local taxes of at least $56 million d. More than $1 billion (average of $75 million/year) in purchases of goods and services during operations e. More than $40 million in site construction work at startup[ii] With the lifting of the ban Canyon and other companies would resume exploration in Montana and new projects as well as old ones that have been put on hold will strengthen our economy with royalties, taxes, jobs and sales for related businesses. The $ 89 million royalty from the Seven Up Pete project alone spread over 14 years will amount to 10% of the total current yearly income for Montana schools from state trust lands DRAWBACKS There are no drawbacks - only risks that can be managed. Like bleach and gasoline, Cyanide (CN) is a deadly poison when a toxic amount is present in the blood of mammals and fish. Therefore extra care must be taken in the handling and containment of cyanide solutions. I-147 mandates a high level of environmental protection. Since cyanide degrades into non-toxic substances fairly easily and is quickly dispersed and diluted in the natural environment the damage from escaped cyanide though it can be significant is thankfully short term. Humans who ingest a non-fatal dose of cyanide quickly recover and there is no evidence of long-term consequences or buildup of cyanide in the body. There has never been a human fatality in Montana caused by cyanide used in mining. There have been fish kills due to accidental releases of cyanide from mining. Most of these incidents have been minor and none of them have long lasting effects. Our research found no major fish kills in Montana. The fish stocks are repopulated from unaffected downstream fisheries. The mining industry and the agencies that regulate them have learned from these incidents and are better equipped to prevent them. PRECAUTIONS The steps required by I 147 to ensure the safe containment of cyanide in mining include but are not limited to: All ponds and impoundments must be large enough to contain 100 year flood event in addition to normal processing fluids And they must have a double liner and a system for detecting leaks. There must be a contingency system if a leak does occur All vats, tanks and containers for cyanide solutions must have a standby containment system 25% larger than the main system There must be a monitoring program The state may impose additional requirements ENVIRONMENTALISTS ALLEGATIONS ABOUT CYANIDE LEACHING Clark Fork Coalition .However, in underground water, cyanide may persist for a long time

True, but in most likely in a compound that has little health risk because the cyanide almost always complexes with iron which renders it harmless (i.e. iron cyanide is an anti-caking ingredient in table salt that we use daily)".[iii]that between 1992 and 1998, In Montana, for example, the Dept. of Environmental Quality reports there were 62 spills or leaks of cyanide, some of which killed fish and wildlife. FALSE. Most if not all were within the containament areas at their respective mines and had no release to the area surrounding the mine.[iv] ."A double-liner also hasnt prevented a single leach facility from leaking cyanide solution and other pollutants into groundwater. FALSE. I am unaware of any cyanide leaks to the groundwater through a properly constructed double (or single) liner system.[v] Montana Environmental Information Center Canyon claims it has an approved plan to reclaim the Kendall mine and wants to begin work. MEIC claims Canyon does not have an approved plan and pressured DEQ to stop them from reclamation while at the same time criticizing Canyon for not reclaiming the mine. DOES CANYON HAVE AN APPROVED PLAN OR NOT? Before a mine can start operations it is required to have an approved operating and reclamation plan. The bond is calculated on that plan. . It has been a common practice in recent years of the DEQ to ignore the reclamation plan upon closure and insist on a new plan more focused on restoration than reclamation and consequently the bond will rarely cover the cost.[vi] In short DEQ changes the rules after the game is over.MEIC and others always point to problems at other Montana mines to convince citizens to vote against cyanide/mining. WHAT IS THE REAL STORY AT THE BEAL, KENDALL, ZORTMAN, GOLDEN SUNLIGHT MINES? The problems at Beal, Kendall, Zortman/Landusky are not cyanide related but have to do with naturally occurring minerals in the county rock. At Beal the source of the mineral, Selenium is not known and may not be related to mining at all. The same may be true at Kendall. Zortman is an Acid Rock Drainage (ARD) problem. Since the Zortman closure, significant advancements in ARD prediction have been developed. Ore is routinely tested for ARD potential to allow for preventative planning. The problem at Golden Sunlight was with an approved plan that was incorrectly applied. The second pond utilized a liner system to prevent that from happening in the future. In all cases, the companies were operating under approved plans that had some unexpected results. None of the problems are impossible to fix and none were caused by cyanide or the technology associated with it.[vii] Other Questions about Cyanide Can we construct a leak-proof, puncture proof liner that will contain cyanide (and other pollutants)?

The technology today has advanced so far that the rare pad leaks of 10 years ago would be extremely unlikely. In fact, the technology is also successfully used in municipal garbage dumps[viii] Can we construct containment ponds large enough to contain 50 year runoff and flood events? 100 year? A pond designed to contain the amount that would fall on the tailings pond or heap is no significant task; nor is the cost.[ix] In fact this is a requirement of I-147 Will there be stream monitoring with I 147? . Not only stream but spring and ground-water monitoring as well.[x] Do we know enough about neutralizing the leach water to be able to clean it all up after mine shutdown? Yes without any problems[xi] Arent there other methods that can be used besides cyanide? Yes. However each method is only applicable to specific ores and conditions. Coarse gold ores do not leach in a reasonable period of time. Recoveries will be low. The other leach methods are very expensive, have lower recovery rates, are bioaccumulating (deadly to man and animals over time), and have much higher environmental risk. Cyanide is easily managed and has been used for nearly 100 years in the mining sector without incident although one suspect case has been reported in CO.[xii]Was I -137 about cyanide? No. Cyanide was a scare tactic used to stop open-pit mining. Similar laws passed elsewhere, including countries like Turkey, have since repealed them because of their harm to the economies.[xiii] SUMMARY Cyanide occurs naturally in the environment, in our food and in our bodies. It is harmless unless we get a toxic dose all at once. It cannot accumulate or build up in a system until it reaches a toxic level. Large quantities of cyanide compounds are used safely every day to make common products for our use.. Cyanide in the environment is diluted and degraded into harmless substances by natural processes. There are huge economic benefits for Montana that come with a healthy, productive mining industry. In order to realize these benefits, we must allow cyanide leaching because it is the only economical way many of our most important mineral deposits can be recovered. The dangers inherent in the use of cyanide are real. But they are dealt with safely by industry every day all over the world. I-147 includes new statutory safeguards. It also includes the provision that the state can require additional controls if the need arises. The environmental conflict industry does not want mining in Montana. They are willing to use scare tactics and manipulate the truth in order to get what they want. The 1998 ballot initiative was not a true indication of the will of the people

of Montana because the whole truth about cyanide leaching in gold and silver mining was kept from them. What we need is an informed, careful, thoughtful decision by the voters that balances the risks with the benefits.

Cyanide Use in Gold Production O ne of the reasons for the high value placed on gold is its resistance to attack by most chemicals. One exception is cyanide, or more specifically, a cyanidecontaining solution, which dissolves the precious metal. Cyanide is used in mining to extract gold (and silver) from ores, particularly lowgrade ores and ores that cannot be readily treated through simple physical processes such as crushing and gravity separation. The Process The use of water-based solutions to extract and recover metals such as gold is called hydrometallurgy. Gold mining operations use very dilute solutions of sodium cyanide (NaCN), typically in the range of 0.01% and 0.05% cyanide (100 to 500 parts per million). The process of metal dissolution is called leaching. The sodium cyanide dissolves in water where, under mildly oxidizing conditions, it dissolves the gold contained in the ore. The resultant gold-bearing solution is called pregnant solution. Either zinc metal or activated carbon is then added to the pregnant solution to recover the gold by removing it from the solution. The residual or barren solution (i.e. barren of gold) may be re-circulated to extract more gold or routed to a waste treatment facility. Approaches to treating this waste solution of cyanide are discussed in Section 7. There are two general approaches to leaching gold from mined ore using cyanide: tank leaching and heap leaching. Tank leaching is the conventional method, in which gold ore is

crushed and ground to a size of less than one millimetre in diameter. In some cases, a portion of the gold can be recovered from this finely ground material as discrete particles of gold using gravity-separation techniques. In most cases, the finely ground ore is directly leached in tanks to dissolve the gold in a cyanide solution. When gold is recovered in a conventional plant with leaching in tanks, the barren solution will be collected along with the solid wastes (tailings) in a tailings impoundment system. There, part of the solution will remain within the pores of the settled tailings and part will decant and collect in a pond on top of the tailings, from which it is recycled back to the plant. In most plants, because impurities 8 The Management of Cyanide in Gold Extraction Gold recovery from cyanide solution using activated carbon (charcoal). Photo courtesy of Minorcobuild up in these solutions, some of the cyanidebearing solutions must be pumped to a treatment system for disposal (see Section 7). Recent technical advances enable the heap-leaching of some gold ores. With this method, the ore is crushed to less than a few centimetres in diameter and placed in large piles or heaps. A solution of cyanide is trickled through these heaps to dissolve the gold. When heap-leaching technology is used to extract gold, the barren solution is collected in a pond, from which it is commonly recharged with cyanide and recycled back into the leaching system. The modern gold industry uses cyanide almost exclusively as the leaching agent for gold. Other complexing agents such as thiourea, chlorides and other halides have been used to extract gold from ores, but these are not generally cost-effective and present their own environmental and health concerns. Cyanide complexes are more stable and effective, and do not require additional aggressive chemicals to effect gold recovery. Cyanide has 9 Cyanide Use in Gold Production Construction of a leach pad at Pikes Peak, Colorado, USA.

Photo courtesy of Minorcobeen used in mining for over a century (see box). An older technique for gold recovery, which is no longer used in modern gold plants, is amalgamation with liquid mercury. In some developing countries, artisanal miners still use liquid mercury as a means of complexing gold from small mine workings. This practice is discouraged, however, as poor management of both liquid mercury and the vapour arising from volatilizing mercury contributes to serious health problems among artisanal miners. 10 The Management of Cyanide in Gold Extraction Box 1. History of Cyanide Use in Mining While environmental concerns over the use of cyanide in mining have become more public only in the last few years, there actually is a very long history of cyanide use in metallurgical and related processes all around the world. Dippel and Diesbach discovered Prussian blue (iron ferrocyanide) in 1704. The earliest well-documented work was Scheeles studies of solubility of gold in cyanide solutions d ating from 1783 in Sweden. Gold-cyanide chemistry was studied actively in the mid-19th century in England (Faraday), Germany (Elsner), and Russia (Elkington and Bagration). By 1840, Elkington held a patent for the use of potassium cyanide solutions for electroplating gold and silver. Elsner led the evaluation of the role of oxygen in gold dissolution using cyanide solutions, and Elsners Equation describing the extraction of gold from ores by cyanide was known by 1846. Patents formalized by McArthur and the Forrest brothers in 1887 and 1888 effectively established the current cyanidation process, the use of cyanide dissolution and precipitation using zinc. However, there were still earlier patents in the USA for cyanide leaching (Rae in 1869) and recovery from chlorinated solutions using charcoal (Davis in 1880). The first commercial-scale cyanidation plant began operating at the Crown Mine in New Zealand in 1889, and by 1904 cyanidation processes were also in place in South Africa, Australia, United States, Mexico and France. Therefore, by the turn of the century, the use of cyanide to extract gold from low-grade ores was a fully established metallurgical technology.

CYANIDATION Cyanide leaching is the standard method used for recovering most of the gold throughout the world today. The process originated around 1890 and quickly replaced all competing technologies. The reason was strictly economical in nature. Where amalgamation plants could recover about 60% of the gold present, cyanide could recover about 90%. Because of the improved recovery, many of the old tailings piles from other processes have been economically reprocessed by cyanide leaching. Cyanide is as close to a universal solvent for gold as has been developed. Other leaching reagents will only work on very specific types of ore. The standard cyanide leach process consists of grinding the ore to about 80% 200 mesh, mixing the ore/water grinding slurry with about 2 pounds per ton of sodium cyanide and enough quick lime to keep the pH of the solution at about 11.0. At a slurry concentration of 50% solids, the slurry passes through a series of agitated mixing tanks with a residence time of 24 hours. The gold bearing liquid is then separated from the leached solids in thickener tanks or vacuum filters, and the tailings are washed to remove gold and cyanide prior to disposal. The separation and washing take place in a series of units by a process referred to as counter current decantation (CCD). Gold is then recovered from the pregnant solution by zinc precipitation and the solution is recycled for reuse in leaching and grinding.