June summary- dynamic Falmouth, birthday milestones and sad news from Germany

The month of May ended with a heatwave with unusually high temperatures down here in Cornwall, but the first two weeks of June were unusually cold and wet. The dismal weather continued to the middle of the month, when the annual UK Mining Conference in Cornwall was held in Falmouth. With a record attendance of 480 delegates it was good to catch up with familiar faces from as far away as Australia.

With Australian delegates Nigel Grigg and Ben Wraith, of Gekko Systems

And congratulations to Prof. Frances Wall, of Camborne School of Mines, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the conference dinner.  Frances was a keynote lecturer at MEI's Process Mineralogy '18 in Cape Town.

Frances Wall (left) in Cape Town, 2018

There's always something going on in Falmouth, Cornwall's jewel in the crown, and the weekend after the conference crowds flocked into the town for the annual Sea Shanty Festival. It takes over Falmouth every June, filling pubs, quaysides, beer gardens, streets and waterfront stages with traditional maritime songs, folk music and huge crowd singalongs. There were pirates everywhere!

Also in the middle of the month we announced a keynote lecture for next year's Hydrometallurgy '27. Dr. Kathy Sole will highlight the Nchanga Tailings Leach-Solvent Extraction-Electrowinning process, showing how this elegant process conforms to the principles for a circular hydrometallurgy circuit and can be considered to have been ahead of its time with respect to these ideas. Today, some 20% of world primary copper cathode is produced using this technology, with the dominant contribution coming from the African Copper Belt, so those who undertook the bold decision to develop this technology can hold their heads up high.

It is now over half a century since the development and construction of the massive plant on the Zambian Copperbelt, and only a few of the members of the team are still alive, but I was pleased to hear from the survivors shortly after my posting of 8th June. 

Ken Severs said that he was a minor contributor to the plant, his association with it being merely the months before he was, in October 1970, transferred to the newly-established Zambian Engineering Unit in Ashford, England. but in January 1971 he worked with Les Stewart in Arizona, using the Bagdad commercial plant as an experimental test facility for the tailings leach plant.

Les Stewart, who now lives in Alderney in the Channel Islands, emailed to say that being Tailings Leach Superintendent was an exciting start to his career, much of which he owes to Jack Holmes, who led the project.

Paul Smithson, who is now retired in Malta, emailed to wish all the best to the remaining Nchanga hands. Paul was involved with the high grade leach plant when I was transferred there briefly in 1973, prior to my departure from Zambia.  As was Willem Duyvestyn, who became a member of the tailings leach project. Willem is now semi-retired in Colorado, developing novel technologies for various critical metals including a novel chalcopyrite leaching technology.

The man who will forever be associated with the project and who made the final recommendation for the go-ahead, is Jack Holmes. He and his wife live in Somerset West, just 35 miles from Cape Town and despite being in his mid-90s he is planning to attend Hydrometallurgy '27 next year to hear Kathy's keynote. 

We celebrated two special birthdays this month. Very best wishes from all the family to Jon, who reached the milestone of his 50th birthday on the 17th. 

A week later, the legendary flotation scientist Prof. Graeme Jameson celebrated his 90th birthday. Congratulations, Graeme, from all of us at MEI, on this remarkable occasion. Your contributions to the minerals industry have left an enduring legacy, and it has been a privilege for so many of us to know and work with you over the years. 

We hope that Graeme will be able to join us at Flotation '27 in Cape Town next year, as, although he formally retired at the end of 2022, he and his small research team are working on two long-term projects. In the first, making use of a new way of improving the flotation kinetics and ultimate recovery of floatable particles and in the second aiming to reduce the size of flotation cells significantly, to reduce footprint and volume, hopefully by an order of magnitude.

I will always treasure the photograph taken at Flotation '25 of Graeme and me with our grandsons, Sam and Will. A wonderful memory of a very special occasion, where we celebrated my 80th birthday!

Graeme and me with grandsons Will and Sam

In the photo below, taken nine years ago at the SME Annual Meeting in Denver, Graeme is with Dr. Hanna Horsch, who was then with Hazen Research, Colorado.  Yesterday I was shocked and saddened to hear that Hanna died eight days ago in Germany.

Hanna was a lovely person and an exceptional mineralogist with over 25 years' experience in academia, industry and research organisations, mainly in the fields of applied and instrumental mineralogy.  She had many years experience with Anglo American Research Labs, then Intellection, FEI, Hazen Research, Inc. and SGS. She was a contributor to six MEI Conferences, in automated mineralogy, process mineralogy and flotation and we would catch up regularly at SME Annual Meetings. Our thoughts are with Hanna's family and ex-colleagues.

And finally,  just as the month of May ended with a heatwave, a record-breaking heatwave hit Europe and the UK at the end of this month, with parts of southern England facing temperatures in the high 30s C.  This month's heatwave was hotter in peak temperature, more humid, and more disruptive than that in May. Although May in Falmouth felt like a brilliant early summer spell, last week felt more like proper heatwave conditions, but the sea stopped it becoming as extreme as much of southern England.

The sea is the place to be at 31C: Falmouth's Swanpool beach

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