Blunt Machete
New member
Hi everyone, I would appreciate any help on our current problem.
We recently had a pipe come loose from the gold cell and unfortunately all the chloroauric acid in the bath spilled over the floor. Some was recovered immediately, but the rest had dissolved into the cement brick floor. Roughly 3cm of floor was scraped (XRF scanner helped determine the area envelop of which to dig) and was put into a large drum for storage. Around 1 kg of gold was lost (hopefully all of which was dug) and heterogeneously distributed within all the pieces of cement. Even if we recover 200 grams, I would consider that a win.
Proposed solution: I would like to put in large amounts of conc HCl to dissolve all the cement and have chloroauric acid in solution. The solution can now be filtered. From there, UREA can be added to knock off any nitric and then SMBS can be added to precipitate out gold sponge. The rest of the process is trivial.
However, dissolving cement is tedious and it seems like it is impossible to dissolve anywhere close to all of it. My question - Is there any way to dissolve all the cement and is the proposed solution thereafter a viable strategy?
We recently had a pipe come loose from the gold cell and unfortunately all the chloroauric acid in the bath spilled over the floor. Some was recovered immediately, but the rest had dissolved into the cement brick floor. Roughly 3cm of floor was scraped (XRF scanner helped determine the area envelop of which to dig) and was put into a large drum for storage. Around 1 kg of gold was lost (hopefully all of which was dug) and heterogeneously distributed within all the pieces of cement. Even if we recover 200 grams, I would consider that a win.
Proposed solution: I would like to put in large amounts of conc HCl to dissolve all the cement and have chloroauric acid in solution. The solution can now be filtered. From there, UREA can be added to knock off any nitric and then SMBS can be added to precipitate out gold sponge. The rest of the process is trivial.
However, dissolving cement is tedious and it seems like it is impossible to dissolve anywhere close to all of it. My question - Is there any way to dissolve all the cement and is the proposed solution thereafter a viable strategy?