Copper Mining and Smelting 1944 Chile

This clip shows the Chuquicamata mine, one of the biggest open pit copper mines in the world, located in the north of Chile. The mine was owned and operated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. These mines were mainly self-contained and self-sustaining settlements. They were complete with their own cities to house the workers, their own water and electrical plants, schools, stores, railways, and even in certain cases their own police forces. Production for many years came from the oxidized capping of the orebody which merely required leaching and then electrowinning of the copper, but by 1951 the oxidised reserves were largely exhausted and the company built a mill, flotation plant and smelter to treat the huge reserves of underlying supergene copper sulfides. The electrowinning processes uses electroplating on a large scale for the economical and straightforward purification of non-ferrous metals. A current is passed from an inert anode through a liquid leach solution containing the metal so that the metal is extracted as it is deposited in an electroplating process onto the cathode. This is clipped from the from "United News" Newsreels, compiled 1942 -- 1945 and available on the Internet Archives.

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Education

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• Copper
• mining
• smelting
• WWII
• Chile
• world
• war
• two
• industry
• mineral
• Chuquicamata
• Anaconda
• Mining
• Company
• electrowinning
• newsreel
• metal
• World War II
• Ww2

[vmelkon]

and there us still copper coming from there

[wotsgonon1]

great footage :)