Pre-characterisation screening
Should anyone pay to characterise this facility yet?
GeaSpirit screens closed and abandoned extractive waste facilities before money is spent on sampling. Ask about one facility and you get one decision, the reason behind it, what is missing, and the cheapest thing to do next. The decision is made on pre-characterisation evidence only — no laboratory chemistry is read, because that is the question: whether an assay is yet justified.
Three answers, and the middle one is the common one.
DO NOT PRIORITIZE
What it means On the evidence available today, this facility should not take characterisation budget before the others.
What it does NOT mean Not that the waste is barren. Not that it holds no critical raw materials. Not that it is unviable. And never a reason to remove anything from a register.
What to do Spend the characterisation budget first on facilities with a stronger pre-characterisation case.
Measured on development material. External validation pending.
INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
What it means Not enough to justify an expensive characterisation, and not enough to rule the facility out either.
What it does NOT mean Not that the record is empty, and not that the facility is uninteresting. Most facilities land here and always will.
What to do Read the next action. It names the cheapest step that would settle the specific thing that is missing — usually a document, not a drill.
This is the answer the page exists for: it turns "we do not know" into "we do not know X, and Y is the cheapest way to find out".
INVESTIGATE
What it means The pre-existing evidence gives a reason to look at this facility more closely.
What it does NOT mean Not demonstrated critical raw materials. Not economic. Not better than every other facility. A reading list, not a ranking.
What to do Treat it as a candidate for further investigation and read its evidence before spending anything.
Positive prioritisation is NOT externally validated: no cohort exists that can test whether prior evidence predicts enrichment.
Why that is true, and what would change it, is in the methodology.
Positive prioritisation is not yet externally validated. The exclusion
capability — the facilities GeaSpirit sets aside — is measured on development material and its
external validation is pending. INVESTIGATE is produced by the existing logic and no
cohort yet exists that can test whether prior evidence predicts enrichment, so treat it as a reading
list rather than a ranking.
Facility Explorer
Every facility in the published screening record is browsable here. Open any one of them to see its full evidence and its next action.
What Copernicus does and does not do here
GeaSpirit retrieves real Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM data for these facilities, and it is worth being exact about what that buys. It does not improve the prioritisation decision. We tested it on 325 facilities with 650 sensor readings: no feature separated enriched from non-enriched waste, and none of them resolved any of the eleven evidence gaps the engine tracks. Three candidate features were rejected by our own admission gate.
What Earth observation does supply is the only uniform observation of extent and surface condition for facilities that no register describes — and for inventories decades old, whether the facility is still there at all. That is an observation, not a prediction, and nothing on this page uses a satellite to say what the waste contains.
What this is not
It is not a resource or reserve estimate, not a drilling instruction, not an investment recommendation, and it confers no conformity with any regulation. Evidence Strength orders records by how much evidence stands behind them; it is not calibrated and is never shown as a probability or a percentage. Cost figures are declared scenario bands, not quotations.
Every decision carries its own version stamp, its sources, and the five conditions of the exclusion rule ticked or crossed, under View full evidence. If you disagree with a verdict, the record is built so that you can see exactly where.