Searchlight Minerals Corporation provided an update on the progress that the company has made over the last two years in connection with improving its process system to recover gold, iron and zinc oxide from the Clarkdale Slag Pile in Clarkdale, Arizona. The Slag Project is a reclamation project to recover precious and base metals from the reprocessing of 22 million tons of slag left in place from the smelting of copper ore at the United Verde Copper Mine in Jerome, Arizona in the last century. The Company has concluded that: Induction melting is a simpler and more cost-effective way to remove the iron from the slag than the previously utilized melting technology. Induction melting heats the slag to very high temperatures which causes the iron to be become molten and sink to the bottom of the melter and be recovered as metallic iron once cooled. The resultant residual 'glass' containing other impurities and the gold floats to the top of the melted slag. Since the iron is 33% of the Clarkdale slag and is separated and removed by induction melting, this causes the gold to be contained in a much smaller quantity of glass. This should allow an increase in throughput in a commercial scale system or conversely a reduction in the required size of a Process System to recover the same amount of gold. This Process System is capable of producing high-quality (95-98.5% Fe) iron and zinc oxide as byproducts, both of which are saleable and represent two new potential revenue streams for the Company. The glass containing the gold, which is produced using the Process System, has been repeatedly and consistently fire assayed after induction melting, which the Company had not previously been able to do. In optimizing the Process System, the Company has discovered that the grind size of the glass has a dramatic effect on how much gold is ultimately recovered. The revisions to the Process System now make it possible to produce gold, iron and zinc oxide from the Slag Pile without grinding the raw slag with a High-Pressure Grinder Roller (HPGR) or the use of an autoclave. This is achieved by fine-grinding the glass produced from the slag and leaching it in ambient conditions. Removing the need for an autoclave and the HPGR from the Process System reduces the gold produced from 0.45 ounces per ton to approximately 0.25 ounces per ton, the anticipated associated cost savings are believed to result in equivalent economics. Additionally, it is believed that as optimization testing moves forward that the recovered gold grade may increase.