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Autoclaves: How These Colossal Machines Process Pure Gold
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Autoclaves: How These Colossal Machines Process Pure Gold

48 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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A gold autoclave built in Geel, Belgium is 51 meters long, 7.5 meters wide, and weighs 1,100 tons, making it the largest machine of its kind ever built. This film follows its construction and then its journey by barge, ship, and heavy transport to a gold processing plant in Amursk, in Eastern Russia, tracking the engineers who have to move a house-sized pressure vessel across oceans and rivers without a millimeter of damage. Interviews with the project's engineers and logistics teams explain what an autoclave actually does inside a gold plant, pressure-cooking ore with oxygen to release gold locked inside sulfide minerals that cannot be extracted by cyanide leaching alone. Route surveys, port loadings, and river transfers show the scale of planning behind moving something this size through terrain never built for it. The film treats the autoclave itself as the main character, spending as much time on the physics of the process as on the mechanics of getting it there in one piece.