HOBART, Australia ) -- A gold processing plant designed and partly built by Russian experts opened Tuesday in northeast Tasmania. The plant has been built to extract gold from 350,000 tons of sand left over from the Golden Gate mine at Mathinna, which operated late last century.


The operation, owned by Melbourne-based Riltec, employs technology developed in Russia during the past 25 years in which resins are used for the ion exchange process, rather than the more commonly used carbon.