Copper Mountain Mining Corporation T.CUM

you get what you pay for

[continuity1]

Originally two consulting firms made recommendations, one said the SAG mill was big enough the other said it was not. The less expensive one was chosen and installed. SAG mills were implemented to do away with expensive secondary crushing circuits and meet the demands of high throughput  plants, providing they are adequately sized. You cannot shift the burden of size reduction from your grinding circuits back to the blasting and fragmentation techniques of the pit without paying the price and once you commit to "blasting it to smithereens" as Bugs Bunny would say, you are doomed to failure if your higher feed grades are contained in what has been described as some of the hardest ore on the planet. The question in my mind is why spend close to half a billion dollars and then jeopardize the mission by taking chances on a critical element without a backup plan already engineered for secondary crushing should the gamble fail?