The Recent Operations at The Lead Smelting Unit of Takehara Refinery

In 2003, the lead smelting unit of Takehara Refinery transformed to accept a new mission. This mission uses a blast furnace that has been in operation since the 1970's, and a locally developed process. Formerly, recyclable materials such as used batteries and lead residue had been treated to produce crude lead. In the middle of 2003, we changed the mission to one of charging precious materials such as used PC electric circuits and lead residue from the copper refining process to produce crude lead, gold, and silver. Accordingly, our process uses newly developed equipment to dissolve dioxins in exhaust gas. As a result of implementing the new process, the gold amount contained in the crude lead increased 185% in comparison with the previous process. This paper describes these recent operations at the lead smelting unit of Takehara Refinery.