A year of Ironmonger yields at the Ferric Twins

A year ago a Leviathan Ore Hauler eased a 48-metre Ironmonger Field Refinery into position beside the Ferric Twins, a pair of metal asteroids in the outer Belt about 2.9 AU from the Sun. Two Basilisk Salvage Tugs nudged it the last few hundred metres. Since then my crew of fourteen has been turning raw metal into concentrate, and the numbers are worth sharing.

The Twins are mostly iron-nickel, about 91 per cent by mass, with 9.4 g/t iridium and 31 g/t platinum spread through the metal. The Ironmonger works in two stages. Carbonyl processing strips away the iron and nickel as gas, leaving a residue rich in platinum-group metals. Electrowinning then recovers the precious metals from solution. An 8 MW fission core powers the whole thing.

Over twelve months we ran 74 batches of 120 tonnes each. Platinum recovery averaged 88 per cent, iridium 81 per cent. The iron and nickel are not waste either: Vesta Crucible Refining, who lease claim FV-0650, sell the carbonyl nickel to Olympus Ring shipyards.

Feeding the refinery properly made the biggest difference. In the first quarter we put everything into the plant and wasted power on low-grade chunks. Once Eamon Dubois installed a Sieve Ore-Sorting Rig upstream, rejecting barren rock before it reached the furnace, batch grades rose by a third and our power cost per gram fell accordingly.

What would I change? More spares. Our two worst outages were a cracked carbonyl reactor seal and a failed pump, and each waited three weeks for a part from Vesta. The Guild has since stocked a parts cache on site. If you run an Ironmonger, do the same.