Every Friday morning, SAfm's AMLive's radio anchor John Perlman speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday's At the Coalface transcript:

Perlman: Rain makers, they do exit, and they have even won a prize for their troubles. Tell us about it.

Creamer: South African scientists have won a R1-million global award for their rain-making technology. These scientists have been working on this from the 80s and the award has come from the World Meteorological Organisation and it has been sponsored by a rather water-stressed country, the United Arab Emirates, which is quite appropriate. What they have won this for is the whole concept of seeding clouds to get rain. We had the idea in the 80s of using dry-ice to seed clouds, which has now been abandoned. They have now gone for the hydroscopic method of cloud seeding, which involves getting salt into the clouds and they do that by flaring salt from an aircraft in a convection storm. They found that in 75 storms over an area of 100 km2, they increased the rate of rainfall by 10 % using this method and that increased stream-flow volumes by 25 %, so it has become a part of Department of Water Affairs' official strategy, as the cost of 40c/m3 is comparable to Lesotho Highlands water, which also costs about 40c/m3 for useable water, that is water that you can get out of your tap.

Perlman: A big project for the city of Port Elizabeth, the Nelson Mandela Statue of Freedom. A competition to choose a designer - I believe we have a winner.

Creamer: We have a winner in the design for the Nelson Mandela Statue of Freedom in Port Elizabeth and that is the Equilibrium Studio Architects in Pretoria working in partnership with Endecon-Ubuntu of Port Elizabeth. They are required to build this before 2010. The actual form of it has changed somewhat. It is a spiral tower and not a statue as such and it will stand 123 m high, which is considerably higher than the Statue of Liberty in the US. It will have 17 tiers, each of them having a Mandela theme, and you can literally do your own long walk to freedom in 370 steps. It begins with the early life of Nelson Mandela, goes through to Robben Island on these various themes and ends up, of course, with the democratic elections in 1994. The whole structure is very robust at the base, then smoothing out and finishing up with steel at the tip, all symbolic of this move towards a better, more open life in South Africa. The Statue of Freedom project is expected to be the catalyst of a total rethink of the beachfront development around the harbour at Port Elizabeth. This should result in new tourism and recreation facilities around there. What has to be moved first, of course, are the tank farm and the manganese berth, which must go from the Port Elizabeth harbour across to the new Coega port. Once that happens, it clears the way for this great Nelson Mandela project, which is being promoted by the Mandela Bay Development Agency.

Perlman: Platinum jewellery in the North West Province, what's happening?

Creamer: Platinum and the North West Province, the two are synonymous, the world's greatest mining of platinum coming out of the North West Province. There is a big emphasis now on beneficiation and what is going to be done with what we mine. The Platinum Jewellery Trust has been created and is forming a very good foundation, the National Business Initiative ensuring that it is commercially sound and also sustainable as a structure supporting the creation of jewellery from platinum. It is great to report that this month the first 61 different pieces of jewellery have been put on offer, containing South Africa's finest platinum, diamonds and tanzanite in various pieces of jewellery, that have a hint of Africa, but are not overtly African, and which are being promoted by a very experienced jewellery promoter, Claire Minnitt, with her company, Nine Dots. The jewellery range has been named after the rain queen, Modjadji. These are called the Djadji collection and are being branded as highly-desirable jewellery items.

Perlman: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he'll be back with us at the same time next week.

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