Hoov - While I appreciate your expertise and your fine contributions to this board, I find your insinuations about the lack of assays a little disturbing. You seem to think that today's press release about sending chromite to be re-assayed to verify the high grades is bogus.

You now say (at 6:32 p.m.) that "there is no reason to verify the INAA assays. They are continuously verified over and over again." But in your earlier post (at 11:19 a.m.), you said the following (which I've italicized, and I've highlighted some language for the point I'm about to make):

Although I'm an analytical chemist, I do not work with the INAA (Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis) method, which in this case involves the reactor at McMaster University. Act-Labs, the company doing these assays, is named after the procedure itself. The founder of Act-Labs was the one who developed the method, and commercialized it.

From everything I've read about, the reason it is routinely used for certain assays such as high chromite ores is that it is not affected by interference by other components of the sample. The more routine (for other metals) acid digest method does not work reliably for chromite, because of the possibility of chemical interference. If the chromite doesn't all dissolve, your assay is going to come in low. Because INAA involves the nucleus of the atoms, their chemistry (what each atom is bound to) is of no importance whatsoever. Samples placed in the neutron bombardment flow of the nuclear reactor become radioactive. Each element has its own characteristic radiation frequency. If you know the mass of the sample that was irradiated, the intensity (time and rate) of the neutron bombardment, and the amount of radiation of specific frequencies given off, you can determine the precise amount of each element that is present.

As I said at the beginning, though, I have no practical experience with this method. If there are interferences involving chromite, I haven't found any mentioned in my research. I have no reason to believe that the results for chromite assays would be in any way unreliable. Other methods are, though. Without specifying what alternate methods are being employed, I cannot further analyze this new release.

My point is, you admit that this is not your particular area of expertise, rather that you are "an analytical chemist" and "do not work with the INAA method" and that you "have no practical experience with this method."

You also say that the reason the INAA method of assaying is preferred for chromite is because, the traditional "acid digest method does not work reliably for chromite because of the possibility of chemical interference."

However, you cannot say with certainty that the INAA method of assaying is infallible, nor that the persons at Act-Labs who are doing the INAA assays are infallible, or that there may be some other legitimate reason that Prof. Mungall or the other geologists or directors want to have these assays confirmed by a separate lab.

You say, "I have no practical experience with this [INAA] method. If there are interferences involving chromite, I haven't found any mentioned in my research." Just because you have not yet found possible interferences in your recent studies into INAA method, does not mean they do not exist. Also, it might be a "human error" in the INAA process that the Noront geos and directors are afraid of.

The bottom line is, that we need to give the talented geologists and directors at Noront a little leeway to do their job, and not always assume the worst, like that they are trying to play "hide the ball" with us, and that they are simply making up excuses for not being able to be more specific or tell us more.