What did I do? Made a mistake

[lawsonland]

Hi,
I had some gold foils (stripped in AP), I added some hydrochloric (was going to disolve in HCl & Clorox to refine more) I ran out of the hydrochloric and had another bottle outside. The label had come off it but remember putting it there, so i put some more into the gold bottle.
It turned out to be Nitric. Dumb mistake, I saw the label coming off the other day and meant to mark it but forgot. I put the bottles in the wrong locations
All my gold disolved and now I have a dark orange liquid.
I believe the combo made AR, I have not done anything with AR and wondering how I get my gold back and what I need to do to be able to eventually refine it using HCl &Clorox and drop with SMB.
Thanks

 

[martyn111]

You are going to have to neutralise the excess nitric acid in your solution either by evaporating to a syrupy consistancy, re hydrate with hcl, and repeat several times until the nox fumes aren't seen anymore, rehydrate using water, tap water is fine, precipitate using smb, incinerate the solids and then proceed as you would have done for hcl/chlorox.
Alternatively you could just cement everything out of solution using copper, incinerate the cement and proceed as you would have done for hcl/chlorox.
On another point, always keep chemicals labeled and stored correctly to prevent future mix ups.

 

[lawsonland]

Thanks,
I will be marking everything with a permenent marker.

I have more foils, should I just continue with what I have (add more foils to the mix) and then drop. Or should I just kill it now and stay with what I have been doing?

 

[martyn111]

Personally I would kill it now and then add fresh foils after the cement/solids (depending on which method you use to kill the AR) have been incinerated.

 

[Palladium]

You know actually that might not be a bad idea. If all you started with was foils and you added nitric and hcl then the solution should be pretty free of base metals then. The only problem you have is the free nitric in solution. If you add more foils then the excess nitric will be consumed and you shouldn't have to neutralize the ar. Much like putting a button in ar to eat up the excess nitric. Then all you should have to do is pre filter to remove any foils that didn't dissolve and drop with smb. Then reprocess to make sure you have a clean product.

 

[martyn111]

Good point Palladium, saves wasting the acids in the solution and uses them for a first refining, hadn't thought of that until you suggested it, Thanks