“Are there still places that will smelt the nuggets into bars for you?”
I don’t know the answer to that. The last thing we would do is “smelt the nuggets into bars”. The value of nuggets is much higher than the spot price for gold. Smelting them would decrease their value.
Is “Gold” lost in the smelting process? So you are saying a nugget with potential impurities is worth more than smelting it to purify it? Interesting.