RE:Kozmo Truce with answers Very gracious of you. Lets agree to disagree. If the technology exists to profitably extract 20 ppm Ta then logically there are many other sources and Ta would be in over-supply and cheap as borscht.
And keep in mind we are discussing only the BEST Ta assays - several of the five dumps and many of the holes had negligible tantalum, some had literally zero tantalum. I don't doubt Ta could be xtracted - it just sure as heII doesn't seem like it could be done even for just break-even at those concnetrations.
But as you say, we'll see what Coremet comes up with. And the system they built for Alphamin - correct me if I am wrong but isn't that the one with the highest grade tin deposit in the worl at 4%+ ? and isn't TTX's Sn values around 200 - 500 PARTS PER MILLION?
Good Luck....