Light bulb moment! Ive got it! Why is Novo mucking about with...

Light bulb moment!

Ive got it!

Why is Novo mucking about with possibly the lowest grade ore ever mined, which will be marginal at best, when they have conglomerate...heaps of it, that contains what appears to be good ore grades. Just didnt make sense.

Look at the slides on the latest presentation which show mapped ore bodies. Multiple layers, thickness very variable, and grade variable, and nuggety, and possibly discontinious.

How do you mine this stuff? You simply cannot go in and take out a layer of gold bearing stuff, discarding the spoil above and below it because you dont know which bucket full is ore and which is trash. Even a tuff marker, known to be above one of the layers is not that helpfull as there are multiple layers.

There is no other way other than mine and treat pretty much everything...at least in the portion of conglomerate thats shown by trenching to contain gold bearing layers.

So the 20g/ tonne layer gets mixed up with trash rock and you are processing an average grade of perhaps 1-2 g/tonne. You are going to have to process a lot of this stuff.

The ann contained a detail so far overlooked by many...the Tomra ore sorting machine was mentioned. QH towards the end of the presentation briefly talked about it while he was running out of time.

Because of the nuggety nature of the "stuff", an ore sorting machine might be able to pick out the nuggets. And it might be able to be scaled up to process thousands of tonnes per hour.

Its important that this new process gets every nugget, the ore stream will contain rich pockets followed by trash and then trash containing the odd nugget etc -all at random.

In order to develop the technology, where better to do it using ore from a low grade alluvial plain, which has a mining licence in place? It doesnt have to be a payable operation! Work can start as soon as this machine arrives.

If it works then the next step is to adapt the technology for crushed up conglomerate and THATS THE GOAL!.

Will this work? Only time will tell. If it does then conventional mills like Radio Hill may not be needed to process conglomerate gold.