In every issue of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal, we offer our readers an almost random collection of stories that, on the face of it, have nothing in common: from the achievement of academic excellence at Laurentian University’s Bharti School of Engineering to the multi-million dollar losses sustained by innocent Swiss and German seniors who invested in a Northern Ontario refinery with a checkered past (See Page 29).
In between, we shine the spotlight on the team of brainy robotics engineers at Sudbury’s Penguin ASI and the achievement of Top Gun Turnaround status by Lake Shore Gold CEO Tony Makuch, who knows a thing or two about creating shareholder value – something about which the top brass of United Commodity, the current owner of the aforementioned Yukon Refinery,
haven’t a clue.
If there’s one thing Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal succeeds in communicating every issue it’s the direct relationship between brainpower, business success and the improvement of the human condition.
The amazing growth of the Bharti School of Engineering and the accomplishments of its Junior and Senior Design Teams who won top honours at the 2015 Canadian Engineering Competition speak volumes about the knowledge-based powerhouse that has emerged in our midst.
The profitable extraction and processing of infinitesimally small quantities of minerals embedded in rock thousands of feet underground requires considerably more brainpower than telling a good story about a distant Canadian refinery and persuading naïve investors to part with their hard-earned savings.
I visited the Yukon Refinery in North Cobalt and wrote a story about it in our September 2013 issue. I was taken on a tour and was impressed with what I saw. Several previous owners had gone bankrupt and the facility had been on care and maintenance more often than it was in production, but there were 40 or more people working there and money was being spent on capital improvements. The entire community hoped this long-mothballed plant would finally be put to good use extracting gold and other minerals from tailings and difficult to process concentrates. The Ontario Government through its Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation also bought into the dream, handing over $1 million to the Swiss-based
promoters.
Enough is enough. We have the mining and metallurgical brainpower to come to some conclusion about whether this refinery can finally be put to good use and, if so, how. We owe it to the people of the Timiskaming-Cochrane district and future investors at the mercy of fast-talking “phone sellers.”
The time has come for government, industry and academia to come together to figure this out and either propose something that will work, or put the refinery out of its misery and sell it
for scrap.
Hands up. Who is going to take on this challenge?
