Aqua regia questions pertaining AU and NI fused metal

So I have a friend that gave me a lot of brazing paste scrap. It is 82% gold and 18% nickel 100 mesh. When I look into a microscope the powder making up the paste is tiny little balls. I'm pretty sure the gold and nickel are fused together in each little ball instead of being separate like I thought. My question is: is aqua regia suitable where nickel is involved. And is aqua regia the only way to seperate the two? I have been doing research on this for a month. I've ordered everything I need to do the aqua regia refinement along with a homemade hood vent that sucks everything out and away from me very well. Should I have some sort of filter where the vent exits my garage? If so what kind? I want to make sure I'm doing this as environmentally friendly as possibly and I'm going all out. I downloaded Hoke's book and will continue to educate myself until I'm fully confident with everything. I have a lot of gold and don't want to waste any of it. Thank you in advance for any advice!!!

First advice on that paste is incinerate or melt it first. Whatever is in that paste that holds the metal balls together is nothing you want to put into aqua regia. It will probably make a mess. The resulting alloy or just metal powder can then easily go into aqua regia. Nickel is no problem at all.

There are other ways to separate nickel and gold, but nothing that is easy for a home setup. I would go the acid way if it was me. ... after heating up the braze to a red dull glow to get rid of any organic binders.

I'll leave commenting on your fume hood setup for others.

Göran

Would a HCL and peroxide dissolve the binder? I can definitely melt it. I watched a video of someone soaking a piece of wood then poured the molten metal over it so it bounced off the board into a 5 gallon bucket of ice water so the metal formed in a way to maximize surface space for the aqua regia to eat away at it faster. I appreciate your feedback! I was concerned how the binder would reach to the chemicals which is why I have bothered doing a little test sample until I got some feedback on here. I just wanted to make sure the aqua regia would dissolve the au/ni and the smb would precipitate the gold without any of the nickel interfering. I do have quite a bit of the powder that was never mixed with the binder. Should I melt that or give it some sort of wash before adding that to the aqua regia? I will be doing the (with binder) and (without binder) separately.

No. In the least it is organic and will make an oily black residue on your glassware. At the most it could be insoluble in acid and making it impossible for the acid to reach the metal inside the mass.

Göran gave you the best advice. Incinerate and melt. Then you are working with just the metal.