Ask HN: innovation in the gold mining industry

[Maven911]

Hi all, as part of an industry analysis, I was wondering if any of you knew of any innovation in the gold mining industry, things like:

more efficient extractive methods new techniques to hedge gold futures community initiatives lessening the impact of environmental damage

[defrost]

There's a fair few, it's on going;

Laser scanning ore sizing systems to infer size distributions of reclaim "over ore" on high speed conveyors to optimise SAG Mills (these operate 24/7 @ roughly $36,000.00 per hour in super sized mines).

Better targeted exploration techniques; eg: Holden / Kovesi / Dentith - "Using fancy wavelets on aeromag data to find teh colour" (obligatory deadwood reference).

GPS enabled fleet management to optimise usage & maintenance & avoid million dollar tyre fires on the big tonka toys.

Robot fleets with either autonomous or remote drivers.

They'll be plenty of discussion, boozing, whoring & two-upping over these very issues @ Diggers & Dealers 2013 I'd guess.

http://www.diggersndealers.com.au/

[kevin_rubyhouse]

I don't know anything about the gold mining industry. If you have found good/dense information about it, could you point me to where you found it? I'm sort of interested now. :)

[Maven911 → kevin_rubyhouse]

Hi,

Well I am collecting links as part of my industry analysis, and this is what I have bookmarked as worthwhile:

http://www.minalliance.ca/pdfs/Minalliance_100_innovations_e... http://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v081n07p212.pdf http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/12/12/gol...