Balancing risk & reward

The exploration and design team which worked on the Musselwhite project used a risk/reward approach to convince Placer Dome's Board of Directors and joint venture partner TVX Gold that the deposit is a viable one. To accomplish that, the geological model had to hold up over a strike length of some 1,700 meters, farther to the north that anyone had shown before. A longitudinal section of the deposit and histograms of the tonnes and grades to be expected on 100-meter sections showed that the tonnage is 10 million tonnes at nine grams gold per tonne, provided the geological model held together down plunge.