Thanks for the vote of confidence Larry but I am no metalurgist and I have been out of the loop for several years.

So in order to answer the question I talked to a good friend of mine who was a mine manager for years and got his input (before I relied on old info).

Vale only gets between 80-84% recovery of nickel in Sudbury. The Sudbury ore contains a lot of Pyrite and this makes it more difficult to extract the metals from the ore in the milling, smelting and separation stages. Another company with a different ore composition, perhaps including more pentlandite, could get better recoveries.

Some of Inco's mines in Sudbury have very high grades of nickel, some as high as 13% in some stopes. Of course the average would not be that high but with those grades it is easy to make $$$$.

Noronts` average grade is over 2% I believe which is quite hige compared to many mines. If you check out Royal Nickel, they are planning to open a new mine in Amos Quebec with huge reserves but very low grades of under 1% ( I believe as low as .25%). Scott hand, the former CEO of Inco is heading up that project.

As for copper, I believe the same situation exists in Sudbury. Vale no longer refines it's copper but sells it in an impure concentrate after it comes out of the Smelter.

So if you examined the tailings at Vale you would find that it contains some nickel due to low recoveries, because of the amount of iron in the ore.

SN