Gold and Silver Price Markets
The prices reached by the gold and the silver in the free market have given space to a new stage in the industry of these metals, where the lixiviation in heap leaching with cyanide have proven to be an economical method for exploiting minerals of low law or limited in reserves, whose treatment by conventional procedures of agitation is not practiceable. Another important characteristic of the cyanidation in heap leaching is its flexibility and easy handling from the operational point of view and of the protection of the environment, with the total recirculation of the sterile solutions. Its main disadvantage facing the cyanidation by agitation is a minor extraction, normally between 50% and 70% for the gold, but it can be approximated to that of this one through an adecuation of the conditions of altitude and surface of the heap leaching, the crushing of the mineral, time of lixiviation, previous curing and other workmanships.
This method must find reception in a country as an alternative for exploiting numerous resources in hydrothermal deposits with the characteristics of law or of reserves previously mentioned, in which the degree of oxydation of the mineral pre-suposes a good permeability of the rock, counting besides with favorable climatic conditions of rain and temperature, together with a recuperation with activated carbon of the dissolved precious metals, the complete treatment becomes much more efficient, inexpensive and simple. About this rspect an expedited possibility for the producer would be to process in corn-measure the loaded carbon in regional installations, it being returned discharged and reactivated, ready for its reutilization. This alternative would have to be marked within a national plan of exploitation of auriferous and argentiferous resources, which includes the technologies in question.