Silver Chloride Mess

[Bootsy]

I was asked to resolve a mess that seemed far easier in my mind when I accepted the job, than it has turned out to be. I can and will trudge through it doing it the hard way but it seems like there must be an easier way. I have about a dozen 55 gallon plastic barrels full of a semi-wet stinky sludge / slurry mix that contains a lot of silver as chloride but it is mixed with many contaminants that have made it plenty difficult for me to recover the silver.

Back in the 1990s a local construction company was replacing old sewer lines and ran into cast iron pipes that were thickly plated with silver on the bottom half of the pipes. Apparently there was a large film processor that dumped their waste liquids down the drain for nearly 60 years. In some places the deposited silver was several inches thick. One of the workers salvaged the old pipe and has made a ton of money over the years reclaiming the silver - although he won't say just how much he has harvested so far.

It looks like there is a lot of DE filter-aid mixed in and the remnants of old cloth looking filtering materials - possibly old bags, maybe old pillowcases? -as well as a lot of other unrecognizable materials. Who knows what all is mixed into this mess. My understanding is that after a lot of time was spent trying to remove the silver by using chisels, torches, saws, etc., they eventually dissolved the silver out of the pipes using nitric acid. In filtering the acid years ago it appears that much of it was converted to chloride and left behind.

I can't dry and smelt this stuff without driving off much of the silver in the smoke, plus melting it would take an awful lot of time. In a test of approximately 10 gallons of sludge, I tried reducing it all with caustic and dextrose which seems to have worked. I then tried to dissolve the silver by adding nitric and that seemed to work. But after it cooled enough to filter I found that most of the silver had gone back to chloride. There must be something in this muck that is dropping the silver out of solution no sooner than I get it to dissolve.

The only barrel I've finished so far produced a 434 ounce pure silver ingot. I don't know if this was the best or the worst of the barrels. I do know that I don't want to spend the rest of my life working on this one project. Ideas?
Thanks!

 

[Barren Realms 007]

If you feel that all of your silver has converted to silver chloride and eveything has settled to the bottom pump off the liquid (siphoning will take too long). Take a test from each barrel and put some copper, Salt or HCL and see if anymore solver chloride developes. If not the condense your silver chloride into one location and then use any of the prescribed methods to change to silver. Steel and sulfuric acid w/water, Sodium hydroxide and sugar. You will see it is not that huge of a job once you have a plan laid out and a little patience.

You need to spend more time washing your silver/silver chloride.

 

[Juan Manuel Arcos Frank]

Here are my two cents:

Iron pipes reduce silver complex in fixers to silver,this is a superficial reaction so if iron is not exposed to liquid fixer then there is no reaction and silver complex stays in solution in fixer.As I see, there is no silver chloride in those pipes.

Anyway,you are here to solve a problem so you can convert silver chloride to metallic silver following GSP(GSP=Gold Silver Pro,a prominent Member of this Forum and Great Master of our Brotherhood) instructions milling solid silver chloride to face powder and then process it with iron or zinc/HCl cementation process...you can also convert milled silver chloride to metallic silver using sodium carbonate fusion process that is posted in this Forum.

All kind of silver compounds(like spent fixer) can be transformed,by Mother Nature, to silver sulfide(a black mud,very insoluble) and it usually happens with old spent storaged fixers so you can have silver sulfide in your iron pipes too.Fortunately,there is a process to recover silver sulfide,look for it here in the Forum using the search box.

Probably,you may have a mixure of silver/silver sulfide mud in those old iron pipes.You can convert this mixure to metallic silver using Kunda´s patent(controlled fussion with sodium carbonate).

If you could post a pic of those old pipes it would help a lot.

I hope it helps.

Regrads.

Manuel