Golden Giant Mine
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The Golden Giant Mine was an underground gold mine in the Hemlo mining camp in Canada, located north of Lake Superior, midway between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay, Ontario near the town of Marathon.
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[edit] History
Prospectors John Larch and Don McKinnon discovered gold in the Hemlo camp in the early 1980s, starting a staking rush not seen in Canada since the Klondike gold rush of the late 1800s. Two companies, Golden Sceptre and Goliath Resources, secured rights to a large land package in the area, and were subsequently acquired by Noranda.
Noranda permitted and built the Golden Giant mine in less than two years. With its first pour in April, 1985, the Golden Giant was the first mine in the camp to ship.
Peak production occurred in the early 1990s, approaching 500,000 oz per year. During its 21-year life, the mine produced over 6 million ounces of gold.
[edit] Ownership
Noranda formed Hemlo Gold Mines, Inc. to operate the mine. Hemlo merged with U.S.-producer Battle Mountain Gold in 1996. That company, in turn, was acquired by Newmont Mining, who currently own the property, in 2001.
[edit] Geology
The average grade of the ore was approximately 10 g/t (0.3 oz/t).
[edit] Operations
The mine was designed as a 3000-dmtpd (dry metric tonne per day) operation. With the Block 5 expansion, the mine shaft reached a depth of more than 5000 feet.
The mill was a conventional leach-CIP circuit. The ore was crushed to 3/8" with standard- and short-head cone crushers. The crushed material was fed to one of two grinding circuits (A-circuit = 3 ball mills, B-circuit = single ball mill). A-circuit was one of the first in the world to include the fully-automated Knelson (gravity) conctentrator. A second unit was added to the B-Circuit around the year 2000. Concentrate from the Knelsons was upgraded with a shaking table. That unit was replaced with the first Acacia concentrator installed in North America.
After grinding, the ore was fed to the leach circuit where the gold was dissolved. Dissolved gold was recovered in the carbon-in-pulp circuit. Once or twice per week the carbon was treated in a 15-tonne pressure Zadra strip process. Gold was recovered from the pregnant solution on stainless steel wool cathodes in the refinery.
From 1996 onward, much of the tailings were returned to the mine as pastefill backfill.
[edit] Current Operation
The mine ceased operation in 2005, and closed permanently in 2006. Reclamation of the site is underway.
