Cyanide glitters for some

Talk about cyanide, and images of a lethal pill used by spies to avoid capture come to mind. Few people outside the gold mining industry know that sodium cyanide is used in most of the world’s production of the precious metal.

The days of panning for gold nuggets in California and Alaska are long gone. The public’s enduring love affair with gold can be satisfied only by extracting tiny amounts from ores with a chemical . . .