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Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
The need for renewable materials gets new support from the FPS crowd. News at 11...
We're a bit stuffed then, whilst zinc is a nice-to-have with electronic stuff, its reasonably important for the well being of humans. Is the story scaremongering, or are we all doomed?
How many of this stuff can be recovered by recycling? In the EU, companies now have to recycle old electronic equipment, which will surely extend the availability of these materials.
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
MP3 Search Engine
This is completely wrong things recycle their selves over time. Thats how are Earth seems to work. Im just clearing this up but didnt they also say the world would end by 2012 any way =p
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It would be mighty surprising if this chicken-little themed story was correct.
Most things when in short supply, their price goes up. People notice this and they either cut back on their use of the stuff, find a substitute, or go out digging for it.
We do have a terrible shortage of celluloid shirt collars, ivory piano keys, whale oil and pyramid shims. Who cares?
We're doomed...
Guess what, humans are using up precious resources in their inventive quest for more tools/toys/and other environmental "improvements". No sh*t we are going to run out of some of the more unique elements. But as usual, when something gets scarce, it gets expensive and we find other materials as a substitute.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
We still haven't even begun to use our Upsidasium supply.
Surely it will last us forever.
I just pooped your party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling
*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Had the transistor not come along, doubtless by now the computer industry would have run out of the molybdenum for vacuum tubes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Though the point of the article is well taken, I think worrying about copper is unnecessary. As we replace copper wire with glass fiber, that will free up lots of the stuff.
NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! Come back, zinc, come back!
*Whew*, it was just a dream. Thank goodness I still live in a world of telephones, car batteries, handguns [*bang*!] and many things made of zinc.
Apparently Gallium isn't a Rare Earth Element.
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
We saw this with oil scares (it's all going to run out/there's only 25 years supply) in the 70's and 80's. We'll see it with pretty much every other resource as it makes a nice, juicy story. In practice the price may well go up, but we'll live with it or maybe find cheaper alternatives
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The sun will forge some more and send it off through the void... Oh, wait, we're impatient and hardly recycle what we've already used.
Looks like asteroid mining is about to take off.
Of course someone is about to shoot me down for this as I don't know the concentrations of gallium, Indium and other metals in the average asteroid.
The article states Indium is used in LCD displays, but would it also be used in LED displays?
Something tells me that "the world's supply" of these elements isn't actually going down. Unless Ye Olde Alchemical Procefes (sorry, Mr. Stephenson) are actually transmuting, say, indium, into gold... it's just a question of where the elements are. Which is to say that I'm sure there's lots of it sitting right there in landfills, probably easier to get to than it is when bound up in 100 tons of rock and dirt in a mine. I mean, we didn't ship THAT much of the stuff to Mars yet, did we?
Or, if the point is that all of these elements are bound up in in-use devices, and always will be, then that's another matter. But I'd be a bit surprised to find that we've actually touched even close to all of the deposits available. Just the cheap ones. And recycling will probably be cheaper than, say, mining it on the moon or the ocean floor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
First of all, the "rare earths" are not all thst rare.
Secondly, none of the elements mentioned in the sd story are in any way even near to being a rare earth, i.e. an element in that row of the periodic table.
And of course it's unlikely we will "run out" of anything, or that it will matter. Things seem to turn up when the price goes up, or we find substitutes.
Otherwise, the story was okay.
mining our landfills will begin...
;)
It was going to have to happen eventually. One thing i've always thought to myself is, that if the earth is here 50,000 years from now and some cognitive being starts exploring, everything will be told in our landfills... They may not be able to know what we did at this time, but they will know the materials we used - at least Styrofoam
How exactly are these elements "used up"? Yes, they might be more expensive to recover, but it's not like they're exhausted by their use. Unless we're shooting them into space, or changing them via nuclear fusion/fission, the elements aren't gone. You know, matter cannot be created or destroyed and all that? I'm no chemist, but as far as I learned chem in high school and college, we still haven't found a chemical way to transform one element into another element (alchemy?).
So basically what is really going to happen is these rare elements are going to get much more expensive because they will have to be recovered from what we're using them for. That's not great, but it's not "element extinction".
Buried as inaccurate.. oh wait Slashdot.
Every few weeks we have to endure this kind of drivel. Doom and gloom to sell news, get grant dollars, whatever. Last week's scare mongering wearing thing? Just trot out the latest manbearpig. In cases such as this, past performance IS a pretty good indicator of the future. We, mankind, make improvements, overcome shortfalls, etc. OLEDs will surpass LCDs in price/performance. Then the next. And the next. And so on. I'm damn sick of the media (ALL of the media be it online, print, radio, conservative, liberal, "Fair and Balanced", whatever) basing 95% of their reporting on sensationalism to pump up non-news.
This means that the vast majority of society, the parasites who know nothing other than consume, consume, consume, will finally wither and die on the vine. As the world's overloaded infrastructure breaks down, governments will either disintegrate into anarchy, or police states. The trick will be to live in a country that chooses anarchy. Only then will people have the perspective to realize what a mess that they've voted into existence, and perhaps start again on better footing. A little revolution now and then, is a healthy thing.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
At some point and it seems that point is soon, we are going to have to crack open all those old landfills. Think of how much has been tossed in there before we really started to pay attention to reuse.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Sounds like it's about time to invest more money into molecular nanotechnology. It's still decades off, but most resources on this planet won't last forever. It's never too early to start planning for the future.
One has to wonder how many of the world's problems could be solved if we'd just invest the money for the Iraq war into R&D instead. The research will still take time, but at least it'll get done.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Everyone relax, we can mine the stuff from our own landfills.
stuff |
All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.
We are of course not shooting our rare Earth elements into space, they won't be gone, they will be sitting in waste dumps in China and elsewhere.
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
A frew decades ago the supply of copper seemed to run out. This resulted in a large hike in copper prices that made the copper in AT&T's wires in the US more valueble than the stocks of the entire company. Then a bunch of people opened new copper mines that extracted copper ore that was not profitable to extract at the earlier lower price.
Then the price fell again, but to a higher level than it was before.
This is what happens with all kinds of raw materials. The price goes up, but the supply doesn't try out.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
The elements are not "destroyed" by being put into electronics — or anything else, that does not leave the planet. They don't disappear from Earth.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This sounds like a sensationalist story. There's a difference between "uneconomical" and "unavailable". Didn't people think we were going to run out of oil by now? The difference is that you can't go dig a well with your pickax and shovel in your backyard anymore. You have to do deep water offshore drilling or extract it from oil sands. There is even coal liquefaction technology.
The shortage of metals is something that we will deal with in one way or another. Fiber optics replace copper for telecommunications, composites can replace metals in certain applications, and so forth. What we need to look at is when it is economically viable to make the switch. The free market is much more efficient than people give it credit for. It will do its job one way or another.
apparently the metal dealers, the guys whose livelyhood depends on knowing what's up with metals, they don't know that these elements are kaput.
a little googling shows that Hafnium you can buy on the internet, no sweat, at about $12 a gram. Many times cheaper than HP printer ink.
and without more Illudium how will we make moreQ-36 Explosive Space Modulators
Hey, great idea, let's get off this planet before we die of overpopulation, the moon is ripe to be mined, mars will do fine after some teraforming. Once April 2063 has passed, then we will have faster than light travel and we can colonize planets outside the solar system.
Time to put the finishing touches to my fission reactor...
1 Build fission reactor ...
2 Add Hydrogen
3
4 Profit!
The Earth's crust is about 10 miles thick.
Are all the "rare earth elements" only up at the surface where we mine?
I'm guessing we've actually mined a tiny fraction of 1% of the planet.
I think of oil in the same way. I have no scientific data, but my guess is that there is a huge amount of undiscovered oil waiting all over the world. Just because we haven't found it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Hint: Most smelting processes are not perfect at extracting their goal and they leave behind "tailings". Some simple math will show when it's profitable to run the tailings again through the process. It's happened before and will likely happen again. No sweat, and no running out. Just higher prices for miniscule amounts of certain elements.
time to get off this rock, then you've been:
1) Under one
2) Drinking the wrong kind of Kool-Aid®
3) Convinced of your "Devine Right" of supremacy
4) Distracted by {pick one} American Gladiators / Britney / Lindsay / Paris / America's Got Talent
5) All of the above
Personally, I blame the politicians for squandering the lead we had in space, starting in the 1970's.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
What idiot editor let this subject get posted? Hasn't anyone taken an economics class:
Indium becomes scarce - price of indium rises - people recycle indium; people seek substitutes for indium - technological breakthrough allows substitution of dirt (well, ok, silicon) for indium - indium prices plummet; dirt prices rise - indium hoarders bemoan price drop, cannot give away their supplies.
Sheesh!
Do you want to lose your readers or what?
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
How convenient that we can find most of this stuff in abundance throughout the solar system.
Now it's only a matter of mining it.
Despite being called rare earths these elements almost certainly exist in comparatively large quantities elsewhere in the solar system. With the advent of space travel the earth doesn't have to be a closed system any more. Sure, it's prohibitively expensive now but so was transatlantic flight at one point.
Element 115 to the rescue!
It's not like these materials are gone. They just need to be extracted from the cell phones, laptops, etc that are being sent to landfill sites. As for copper, there's tons of in the old wiring of buildings. For example, the company I work for recently moved our servers and ran a bunch of new network cables. All the old ones are no longer being used, but they're still all there.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
...welcome our alchemist / mineral-importing-alien overlords.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
there's work underway to replace the light emitting components of flat panel displays with carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are much better conductors of electricity than copper. Graphene (flat carbon) could potentially replace silicon. the nanotubes are also incredibly strong, potentially replacing steel and concrete as a building material. Seeing as carbon is so good for making tubes, it could replace the entire internet AS WELL!!!!!!
prepare the survey weasels.
*mines veldspar*
The funny thing is, there is a DOOM board game and DOOM card game out there, so QUAKE for abacus or even slide rule wouldn't surprise me at all.
Demand outpaces supply so the price rises, this has a number of effects:
* Things are expensive and hence people use less, reducing the demand so it does not exceed supply.
* Alternative items become competitive in price, and research into them has a better ROI and hence occurs more. See price of oil and alternative energy for a current example of that.
* It becomes worth recycling, since the value of the recoverable stuff exceeds the cost of getting it back out.
If there is a non-substitutable essential component of LCD monitores which we will run out of in the near term then LCD monitors will rise in price and people won't have 5 of them. And when they replace an old one with a new one that component will be recycled from the old device. In reality though, a substitute will be found - LCD might be more expensive, have some lower quality display (I have no idea what the stuff is used for...), be larger/heavier/whatever. But they won't disappear - well unless an alternative becomes price/performance competitive due to those changes.
Just like "peak oil" is no big deal since supply/demand/substitution solves the problem.
I've been saying this for years. We'll be exploring landfills soon after they're no longer viable for producing methane gas. Meanwhile, states that refused to bury, and opted to dump their garbage elsewhere will be kicking themselves - hard.
Such "exhausted" landfills will be packed with little more than inorganic waste, like easily harvested metals. Point at anything on the periodic table and it'll exist in a landfill at concentrations far higher than what exists in ore deposits we're mining today; so this will be ridiculously profitable. Add to that the fact that they're all close to home, and you have yourself an industry that does a brisk business in mining landfills. And since all the stinky stuff has long since decomposed, you only have heavy-metals and toxic runoff to worry about (read: just like a normal mine).
After that, companies will look to cut out the middle man and buy back everyone's e-waste after the recycling plant has sorted it out. So the landfill will dissapear, leaving a closed loop from the recovery of raw materials all the way to the consumer and back again.
"SQL Error", you have the board. Pick a category.
Copper prices are now high enough that it's worth trying to steal. Here in Boston, at least once a month there's a story about someone killed trying to steal copper from power lines that turn out to be, y'know, active.
Construction sites now have to be locked up tightly. It's not just the tools that get stolen; it's the pipes and the wire spools.
I assume this will get worse as copper gets scarcer and, thus, more expensive.
The OP mentions plumbing, but I'm not sure that plastic is a viable alternative yet. I've built a few houses, and always used copper, at least for the main plumbing. I remember in the 1990s, the industry tried using PVC, but had problems of some kind, and went back to copper. Today, you can use PEX or Hep2O flexible tubing for heating, but I don't know if it's approved for drinking yet - and we probably don't know its long term stability. Copper is still the gold standard (sorry!) for plumbing.
(Side rant: When copper pipes freeze, you can use an arc welder to heat them back up. You can't do that with PEX, since it's plastic, not metal. So if it gets too cold, your heat stops working... which means the air can't warm up enough to melt the ice... shampoo, rinse, repeat. Make sure your PEX is in a well-insulated wall.)
be dead by then.
It's called the myth of sufficient plenty.
The thought that we can just keep on using more and more of something at an increasing rate and other countries can increase their rate of consumption without any problems because we can always dig up and refine more oil/copper/zinc/or whatever. Don't worry, there will always be gas in your pump, someone will find a new oil field.
People need to change. Consumers should be demanding 100+mpg cars, fully recycled products, whole life cycle design. Engineers and scientists need to step up and provide these solutions.
The glass is either half empty and we are all doomed or half full and we are just waiting for these great strides.
Ok, just getting your blood pressure going again:)
We'll simply invoke apt-get install Cu, Zn...
science, not ideology ;)
the world's supply of Illudium Phosdex holds out.
You know what they say about opinions. They're all fabulous!
First, gallium and indium are not rare earth elements. I don't know what the heck these guys are talking about. Second, there is plenty of gallium around-- it's found anywhere you can refine aluminum from. It's not usually recovered because it isn't economical to, but if it were in fact running out, it could be easily produced as a byproduct of aluminum production.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth's surface. We have barely begun to tap the resources that lie on the bottom of the sea. The ocean beds are rich in countless minerals. About 20% is thought to be covered by manganese nodules, which can contain as much as 2.5% copper, 2% nickel, 0.2% cobalt and 35% manganese, as well as titanium, aluminium, potassium, molybdenum, lead, strontium and other substances. The greatest unexploited mineral resources on earth are on the deep-sea floor, including manganese nodules; cobalt-rich manganese crusts that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese; and hydrothermal deposits that contain copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver. Deep-sea mineral resources are found in specific areas. Manganese nodules are half-buried in comparatively flat deep-sea sediment at a depth of 4,000-6,000 meters. Cobalt-rich manganese crusts cover the slope or top of seamounts like asphalt at a depth of 800-2,400 meters.
I believe that in the future we will routinely mine the ocean and it will become a huge industry. We will have great machines that will work around the clock mining the sea floor.
Well, I was a little concerned until I learned that this is the latest story by Robert Silveberg!
Economists generally start from the assumption they are right about things and try to rationalise it by interpreting the evidence.
Sounds like most Slashdot posters, yourself included.
Humanity will be reduced to roving tribes of barbarians!! Everyone MUST act now to reduce their Miley footprint!!11One!
We're a bit stuffed then, whilst zinc is a nice-to-have with electronic stuff, its reasonably important for the well being of humans. Is the story scaremongering, or are we all doomed?
You could, you know, RECYCLE zinc instead of burying it again with all your other trash.
You can't take the sky from me...
Once the prawn industry realizes that without the rare earth elements they won't be able to push Brazilian flatulence prawn on the 22" flat screen monitors it'll only take them a few minutes to come up with a solution. For that matter, tell them they can't take ANY more pictures of Japanese naked squid sumo girls until they find a way to produce cheap gas (not the B.F.P. kind) and the problem will be solved.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
It looks like we will have enough to get through Dec 21, 2012. That's all we need.
I guess we take all our minerals for granite.
It's about like running out of oil. It will never happen. However, supplies of easily accessible _______ estimated to run out in 2___. Fill in the blanks.
Market forces will force exploitation of near earth asteroids or recycling/landfill mining or exploring for new deposits.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
By the logic in this story, we've already run out of copper.
To oversimplify, today's copper mines are simply large industrial plants that take what is essentially ordinary earth and turn it into a small amount of copper and a large amount of ordinary earth.
Of course, these mines use earth that has more copper than ordinary earth: it is .06 percent copper rather than ordinary earth's .006 percent. Not a big difference! As the price goes up, the amount of copper that's profitable to extract also goes up. .006 percent isn't a lot. .006 percent * 6 * 10^24 kg is a lot. We're never going to run out of copper. Anybody who tries to tell you differently is a scare-mongerer.
The same story applies to pretty much any other mineral (zinc, for example), and probably applies to the trace minerals as well.
The same argument does not apply to oil, if it was produced by organic processes, as many believe.
This is a science story on a supposedly science aware discussion forum and yet a comment making a scientific (and bleedin' obvious) response to why economics doesn't govern the laws of physics gets modded flamebait.
I hope there are at least some moderators with basic knowledge who can remedy this.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Soylent Green is made of People!!!! They said they were going to change it, but they didn't! It's still people!!
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled. Usually, I just refuse them when I get them. But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Until that is rising commodity prices make difficult to extract deposits more economically viable. Then we have a whole new supply at a higher price point.
Peak oil my ass
Maybe the headline should have been "We will be mining landfills by 2017 for Rare Earths."
I don't like my Earth Rare, I prefer it Well done. Tim S
None of these elements are being destroyed, just shuffled about. Someday there may be quite a market for mining old landfills, or services that mine copper piping from houses and replace it with (bio-based) polymer piping. While an interesting article, I'm not too worried.
Actually.... we did.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The Belgian company Umicore specialises in this. They extract all the rare stuff. For some of it there is only one cubic meter available on the entire earth!
linky: link
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Did we run out? No. Did the price go up? Yes. And when it did increase, more people decided to go prospecting for more sources of the metal. The industry also developed alternatives to the small, red components - which is why they're less common on circuit boards today than on those from 20 years ago.
When someone says "we're running out of X", what they're really saying is "we're running out of cheap X". With the possible exception of Helium, there are and always will be millions to billions of tonnes of even the rarest commercial elements in the planet. The only thing that prevents their use is the price of extraction and/or processing.
I stand by my original points and do not think your abusive coments are helpful or credible.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Jimmy: Hey, what gives?
Jimmy's Dad: You said you wanted to live in a world without zinc, Jimmy. Well now your car has no battery.
Jimmy: But I promised Betty I'd pick her up by 6:00. I better give her a call.
Jimmy's Dad: Sorry Jimmy. Without zinc for the rotary mechanism, there are no telephones.
Jimmy: Dear God! What have I done?
(Jimmy pulls out a gun, points it to his head and fires)
Jimmy's Dad: Think again Jimmy. You see the firing pin in your gun was made out of, yep, zinc.
Jimmy: Come back zinc! Come Back!
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
it's happening after 2012.
Some investment bank economists/analysts have said that there is not enough copper in the world to build the same electrical infrastructure as currently exists in the US. However, that's clearly what other nations are trying to do.
The impact on the price of copper should be quite clear.
Balthorium, Thiotimoline, I hear those are in short supply too !
As a chemist, I couldn't help but pull out my copy of Greenwood and Earnshaw's "Chemistry of the Elements." Appendix 4 has a list of the abundance of elements in crustal rocks (g/tonne):
O - 455,000 (#1)
Si - 272,000 (#2)
Al - 83,000 (#3)
Fe - 62,000 (#4)
Ti - 6,320 (#9)
Zn - 76 (#24)
Cu - 66 (#25)
Ga - 19 (#33)
Pb - 13 (37)
Hf - 2.8 (#44)
U - 2.3 (#47)
Cd - 0.16 (#63)
Ag - 0.08 (#64)
Pd - 0.015 (#67)
Pt - 0.01 (#68)
Au - 0.004 (#71)
Ru/Rh - 0.0001 (#75 - dead last)
Sorry about the length, but actual numbers are always enlightening in these discussions. We aren't going to run out of copper (Cu) or zinc (Zn) anytime soon, we'll probably just recycle it better since it will be more expensive to obtain once the major deposits are depleted.
Gold (Au) is pretty darned rare. Because of demand way back when currencies had to be actually represented by something tangible, it's assumed that almost all major deposits have been found. So, with a relatively fixed supply of it, the spot dollar price for gold is considered an accurate indicator for just how much our government is inflating the currency.
However, considering how important palladium (Pd), platinum (Pt), rhodium (Rh) and ruthenium (Ru) are in catalytic processes for bulk chemical production, and the fact that there just isn't much of these elements to begin with, there's already worry in the chemistry community about their rapid depletion.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity
Best to get info from people who get paid to generate it :-)
dave
We just ran out of the unobtainium for the space elevator.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
transition metals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_metal
I guess the post would not have been as exciting with the title "Supplies of Transition Metals Exhausted by 2017"
... it's becoming harder to mine. We actually send very little of this stuff off-world or use it in applications where it's bombarded with enough energy to make it fission. So, we've got lost of the stuff locked up in land-fills and on desktops -- but it's not gone. Sure, digging it up is getting substantially more expensive, but the reason that it's used is because it's economically feasible to do so. If that ceases to be the case, costs will go up and demand will decrease. We'll mine our garbage, etc. I'm not saying it'll be cheap, fun, or even ecologically sound... but the actually amount of the element available isn't changing (much) over time. It's just being moved about.
Our supply of idiotium will always be in infinite supply and we can always get some from the person down the street.
since it started to be known as x.org...
sorry.
I presume that a plastic (or other synthetic material) is right out because...?
Sounds like we could stop the zinc aspect of this right away, by just doing a more permanent coating over the ships.
We desperately need good manufacturing techniques for carbon fibre. With good techniques, just about everything we move around could be made with it, and energy costs would go down.
This ought to be as X-prize-worthy a topic as good solar or good batteries.
But how does it hold up to seawater? Will we need to coat the boats every year with something in short supply?
Obviously you don't have an iPhone, yet.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What we burn is light oil.
Some more complexe plastics and compounds are made from heavy oils which will not be as easy to replace by biofuel than we may think.
When will half of the hafnium be gone? And what is the half-life of hafnium?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I don't really understand all the concern. It's not as if their CDs are going to stop being manufactured...or are they? Although, a 50 year touring/recording run by any band would certainly be exhausting (2017 - 1967 = 50 years).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_(band)
We can just invade Cornwall!
I drank what? -- Socrates
"Insufficient Vespane gas". Darn.
The mix you will obtain from a LCD may means that it is not possible to mix hundredth of LCD together to automatically extract the rare metals by melting it while it is possible to do it with the ore found in some mines.
Also a ton of LCDs may contain much less of the valuable stuff than a ton of ore.
The reality of it is that as we run low on various elements, the price will go up due to factors of supply and demand. This will help drive efforts to find alternatives, reduce the amount needed, and where feasible, recover/recycle those elements. We will never actually run out, but it may simply become too expensive to build TV's out of. Then we'll have to find another way to do it. If there's enough need and the price is worth it, we might end up prospecting asteroids to get the minerals we need.
As for peak oil, we don't know if we've hit it yet because there's historically been an incentive for many oil producers to keep their reserve numbers a secret. We don't know if they've artificially inflated or deflated their numbers for a variety of reasons. Being at peak oil does not mean we aren't going to discover more oil. What it means is that in the future, the oil we discover will be harder to get to, harder to produce, and will not sufficiently replace all the easy to drill oil we have had in the past. It will become impossible to increase oil production and we'll see a decline that will lead to drastic price increases, a switch to alternatives, and overall a decline in demand for it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I have given this a lot of thought to this very issue over the last year.
I have recycled since 1967(boy scouts). Seem like the right thing. But China is now running around buying up mines of just about everything that they can ESP. the items that they have say 20-40% of world-wide reserves. After thinking about this, I think that we are making a number of mistakes.
1) We should not be sending items like disposed-of electronics to other nations. Instead, bury it in specially prepared dumps. Literally. Let nature work on getting rid of the carbon in there. This means that once an element is scarce, then we have readily available stockpiles of it.
2) Take an accounting of exactly what is trying to be cornered by any country. In particular, note when a country is attempting to buy old mines that no longer appear to have large seams in it. Good chance that they know something about the mineral AND is looking to control something in the future.
3) spend some money on recycling tech. It is what we will need to cheaply and efficiently go back to our old dumps and pull out elements from them. 4) Consider turning our recent dumps (esp. from the 70's, 80's, and 90s), from an EPA site, to a national reserve.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Honestly, Couple other posters have it right, it isn't that these elements are going away, its that the current mines will be played out. That doesn't mean that these are the only mines though. There are lots of untapped areas of the world where these stocks exist. During the 19th century, there were lots of mineral mines within 100 miles of my home. One small town was famous as a copper mining town. So famous they named the town for it, Cuprum. If you visit the area there is still lots of copper ore around. There were also Zinc, Gold, Silver, and Mercury mines in the area. With modern technology, most of these mines are not played out. When prices go up high enough, mining companies will move back to these areas. Guaranteed. Locals will tell you that periodically the mining companies will send assay teams into these areas frequently enough to keep their claims alive.
This article is complete foolishness. The elements don't become "extinct". They simple end up in a different form. You wouldn't say Iron was "extinct" if all the iron in the world had turned to rust (iron oxide). It would simply be in a different form as a compound. The comparisons to the wolly mammoth etc.... are simply ridiculous. Would we say the homo erectus is extinct or that it has simply evolved into homo sapiens as our Iron has reacted to form rust.
As many people have commented already this may infact be a good thing for the consumer as it will mean the computer manufacturing industry may have to start buying your old kit back off you rather than trying to find more of the resource. I'm thinking discounted upgrades, i.e. trade in your old flat panel monitor for a hefty discount on a new one.
So...
Demand just creates supply then doesn't it. It's just like selling smarties - we'll have ever more copper forever!
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It should be noted that in 10 years, cities and towns with old landfills will be sitting on some of the most resource rich pieces of land. The "mining rights" should be worth a fortune.
Gold, silver, copper, zinc, iron, hydrocarbon plastic, etc. all in abundance. Scoop it up, melt it down. Once the biological components that produce methane are depleted, then you mine for the elements.
W. has been killing our dollar in the international world. Now, all of our coins are worth more as metal, than as money. Sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
CU is in trouble. Economists, not scientists, keep saying that within a decade, all KNOWN supplies of major copper reserves will be used. In part, it is because we are about to move to huge electrical system throughout BRIC and they want similar amenities to the west. Add in changing ICE to electrical (it will be happening over the next 5 years), and yes, you are looking at MAJOR reserves being gone.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They probably have lots of rare substanes, but to to expensive to recycle instead of mine. "future" could be less than century.
Come back Zinc! Come back!
If we run out of Rare Earth elements, how about mining asteroids? We would have to, and this would act as a huge stimulus to space exploration and technology. Mining Mars, which had many of the same hydrological processes that created ore deposits, would also be possible. We could build a space elevator on Mars much more easily than on Earth. This would make the export of materials from Mars to Earth very inexpensive. If we made the space elevator longer than Mars synchronous orbit, no rocket launch is needed at all, only a small correction burn. We could simply fling it off the end.
http://www.affordablespaceflight.com/spaceelevator.html - search for "Mars Space Elevator"
We are not about to run out of anything. That isn't how mining works. Useful elements are found in deposits of varying quality and accessibility. Only those which it would be profitable to mine are counted as ore. As we exhaust the highest quality and most accessible ones the price of the material rises and it becomes profitible to mine lower quality deposits that did not qualify as ore at lower prices. Thus total reserves of an ore are not fixed but instead vary with price. Given high enough prices you can profitably recover any element from sea water.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Rhodium already went from $200 to $10,000 an ounce. Same thing might be happening there.
1. Buy cheap land.
2. Create a landfill and make people pay you for dumping their waste there.
3. Profit (for the first time)!
4. Wait until it's profitable to mine your landfill for rare elements.
5. Open a mining operation and have people pay you for things you extract from their waste.
6. Profit (for the second time)!
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Oh yeah? Well then how do you explain wholenium getting renamed to three-quartersium, then two-thirdsium, and now hafnium?
It's running out, I tells ya! Run for the hills!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I'm reading this story with a zerg voice going off inside my head
"We require more minerals!"
Hey, at least with the government the way it is today we've got enough overlords.
I'm offended by the idea of paying extra for the privilege of doing extra work to sort my trash. If it's not cost effective to recycle, there's not much point in it. Better to just pile everything up and mine the pile later when it IS cost effective.
I am however, perfectly willing to segregate my trash. Just don't make it difficult, or charge me more for it. And don't ask me to drive halfway across a state to dispose of household hazardous waste like CFLs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
We're talking about depletion of elements here. Elements don't go away short of nuclear reactions and radioactive decay. Just about* all of the Zinc we've ever mined is still on the planet. And I'll bet a LOT of all the rare earth elements ever pulled out of the ground are sitting in landfills. Mine those. Recover the useful elements, continue. Just delayed recycling, really. It may not be cost effective to do so now, but it will be once the easier ways of acquiring needed materials dry up.
While the landfills and muni waste streams contain copious raw materials, the processors aren't geared to use that stream as an input. They've invested billions into the current infrastructure - mined ore, crude oil, raw lumber, etc. Changing to a different feedstock, regardless of how "better" or "more efficient" it may be, requires a huge expenditure of cash. The economists call that "front loading," in that all your expenses are paid up front, as opposed to sticking with the current infrastructure, which is much more profitable in the short term.
Everyone these days is playing the short-term strategy, so you get short-sighted responses. Shouldn't be much of a surprise. One of the functions of a government is to force a policy that a free-market won't readily adopt. I'd love to see the poultry farmers on Maryland's Eastern Shore be required to supply their excess of liqui-poo to a municipal thermal depolymerization plant, instead of polluting the Chesapeake Bay with the runoff. It ain't happening without a shove, in spite of the feedstock being a high-energy-density, easily processed material.
Funny and stupid. All of these elements could be extracted from e-waste if anyone ever thought about it. Soon we'll be mining the landfills. Mark my words. http://www.tv.com/the-simpsons/bart-the-lover/episode/1336/summary.html
Another article designed to spread fear and paranoia. Someone must own stock in big pharma.
PEX has been used outside the USA for decades before the USA developed wide spread acceptance for radiant heating (which also was around for decades before the USA woke up to it.)
Its made from one of the few plastics left nobody has found problems (polyethylene) which has been around a long time.
PEX doesn't get messed up by freezing like copper does-- you shouldn't be freezing any pipes; if you need to be able to heat frozen pipes then something is wrong with the design.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Dr. Paul Armstrong Says:
Gosh, I hope we don't ever run out of Atmospherium - then we wouldn't have any opportunities to do Science and advance the field of Science.
New Scientist had a similar article over a year ago.
Jimmy: Hey, what gives?
Jimmy's Dad: You said you wanted to live in a world without zinc Jimmy. Well now your car has no battery.
Jimmy: But I promised Betty I'd pick her up by 6:00. I better give her a call.
Jimmy's Dad: Sorry Jimmy. Without zinc for the rotary mechanism, there are no telephones.
Jimmy: Dear God! What have I done? (Jimmy pulls out a gun and points it to his head and fires)
Jimmy's Dad: Think again Jimmy. You see the firing pin in your gun was made out of, yep, zinc.
Jimmy: Come back zinc, come back!!
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
Personally, I blame the politicians for squandering the lead we had in space, starting in the 1970's.
Why ? how much lead did they send up ? Is it still in orbit ?
Theoretically, the energy to get to the Moon is a one-time energy expense, assuming it is possible to set up a self-sustaining colony there. That would mean that the extra energy cost to mine metals there would be the energy required to escape from the Moon's gravity well, which is a lot smaller than that of escaping from the Earth. In addition, since the Moon lacks atmosphere, you don't have to be in a big hurry to generate all that energy all at once. It might be sufficient to use energy collected from the Sun over a relatively long period of time.
I do not mean to say that you aren't right that this will not be a reality for quite a while, if ever. It would require a self-sustaining Moon colony with advanced manufacturing capabilities.
spend some money on recycling tech.
I think you've just hit the very reason wy it hasn't been done: Too few people want to make the effort, and no one wants to foot the bill.
As you say, separating kinds of trash before burying it would be a great investment for the future, but making an effort or spending money now for something that will be beneficial in the future doesn't get anyone elected. Promises to give you tax refunds checks NOW gets votes.
You can't take the sky from me...
OMG the sky is falling...
What were we doing for the first 10,000 years of prehistory before the invention of the steel-hulled boat?
Recycling is just part of the radical agenda to destroy America by making us drive smaller cars, which means smaller families which mean birth control which means the End of Christianity. I saw it on Fox News
There is a rampant misunderstanding of the free market and its ability to use substitutes and alternatives as prices rise. Even here on slashdot, where people should know better.
Gallium is a by-product of bauxite refining, so there's no fundamental shortage. But only a small percentage of the world's bauxite production is run through a process for gallium extraction.
A very real problem is that the extraction of many of the rarer minerals is energy-intensive. Huge amounts of raw materials have to be processed to get small amounts of gallium, indium, or zirconium. With low energy prices, this isn't so bad, but as energy prices go up, so do the prices of the harder-to-extract raw materials.
Human civilization is about 5000 years old. Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. Most of the easy to extract ores were mined out decades ago. There aren't enough extractable minerals to keep it going another 200 years.
We haven't had a new, big energy source in 50 years now. It's been 50 years since the first commercial power reactor sold its first kilowatt hour. There's nothing promising on the horizon, either. Expecting energy-intensive extraction methods to solve the minerals problem isn't a promising direction.
Imagine, a world where we have all the knowledge to be a perfectly organized, productive, peaceful, intelligent society, but no raw materials to build anything. We could effortlessly lead a utopian existence, if only we hadn't depleted all the raw materials in reaching our enlightened state. Oh, what a great irony that would be.
COST IS THE #1 PROBLEM.
The economy of the world is built around low costs from exploiting natural conditions not the future man-made situation.
Metals are not used in pure form that often!!
Take an easy element like COPPER:
1) Collect and clean (Copper pipe,etc)
2) Embedded removal (wire or circuit boards,etc) + step 1
3) Copper plating (pennies,etc) + #1 + #2
4) Metal alloys (brass,etc) + #1 + #2
5) Chemicals + #1 + #2
(hundreds of chemicals) X (hundreds of collection situations)
-
The "market" is not going to produce perpetual motion.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You have that worded wrong. Allow me to assist you;
"One of the misuses of government is to try and enforce policies that the free market won't readily adopt due to lack of profitability or practicality. See: Ethanol mandates."
There. That's better.
You see, all Government manages to do when it gets involved in things like this is muck things up, slow things down, and prevent people from actually fixing the issues in question. Government is a big, slow, stupid behemoth that stomps on all the people it is supposedly trying to help. Getting the government involved is a recipe for failure. Government is NEVER the answer.
The Market, on the other hand, is quick, nimble, and a genius. It fixed problems quickly and profitably, and is able to sustain mankind down the road. Letting market forces loose on any problem ASSURES that it will be fixed, often in much less time and at much higher quality than originally expected. The Market is ALWAYS the answer.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Just like most universal statements, its implied the audience gets the point without taking it literally. It comes down to intent of the author really... and the level of false reasoning of the audience.
MOST people should realize that using up ZINC means that you are using up the ready supply of the stuff. I take this stuff assuming the obvious premises and view your objection as being argumentative. I thought the old "matter can not be created or destroyed" was common knowledge?
Yes, I probably give sheeple too much credit.
Cheap sources will be extinct; eventually all alternatives will be as well. The world will have to adapt to sustainable economic models eventually as raw materials go extinct.
Turning Pb into Au is cost prohibitive.
-
The "market" is not going to produce perpetual motion.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Before accepting the argument that we are imminently running out of a whole slew of elements, it would be nice to see a reasonably solid case presented for even one of them.
Looking around for a source that actually makes a case for running out of any of these elements what I came up with are references to New Scientist articles that do nothing of the sort: http://www.idtechex.com/products/en/articles/00000591.asp
and
http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/027ns_005.htm
To the extent that this is even addressed, the articles make appeals to uncertainty - production figures are lacking and good estimates of reserves don't exist - then offer specific dates for running out, alluding to the USGS as providing the data used to make these claims. No explanation of how any of the calculations were done, nor an enumeration of the assumptions regarding supply on which they were based.
So lets pick one of the elements deemed most at risk, gallium say, nearly all of which is used in GaAs electronics.
Actually reading the relevant USGA report: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/gallium/mcs-2008-galli.pdf and also consulting this industry paper (gallium is discussed near the end): http://www.indium.com/_dynamo/download.php?docid=552
we learn the following.
So: if extraction rates can rise to 10% then the world supply is really 100,000 tons. About a 1000 year supply at current usage rates. If we suppose that higher prices and more advanced technology can increase the extraction efficiency beyond this, then the supply is correspondingly increased.
Now there might be an impending imbalance in supply and demand if the total extraction rate by the aluminum industry is too low to match demand in the future. But this is quite different from "running out". Better extraction and more efficient use of gallium could redress it (both natural results of higher prices), and new technologies might largely supplant GaAs with superior products (quantum dot lasers, organic solar cells, anyone?). At some point recycling might take over as the principal supply (one of the reasons that iron production has flattened).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You know cornflakes were originally designed to stop you wanking, don't you?
Doesn't work -- I want my money back!
Most biofuel proponents are agricultural giants trying to increase demand for their product. They tend to sweettalk a lot of 'greens' though, which is clever of them.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I think the real story here has nothing to do with the rarity of various elements. The real story is the rapid and continuous growth in world population. We all know there is a finite supply of every resource on this planet. Some resources are more easily recycled or recovered than others, but the problem is that as population grows these resources have to be spread across a larger and larger population. Eventually, we simply won't have enough resources for everyone.
World Population - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
1900 1,650,000,000
2008 6,707,035,007
2042 9,000,000,000 est.
Google "Julian Simon wager". Very on topic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There are many projects to recycle electronics and even car parts, but many of them are not feasible yet. Lack of them (price increase) will change that.
They are elements, so consuming it doesn't make them disappear. You just have to recycle them. Some day, all those landfills will be considered as profitable mines, and our environment will be a little clearer.
I agree that it will be very very painful process, but I think it will be good things for us.
I was right all along! You owe me 5 bucks, John Locke!
Sincerely,
Thomas Malthus
raise the price and dig deeper.
We just need more powerful digging technology.
Also, there are probably economically viable concentrations of these metals in our garbage dumps.
1% copper is economically recoverable from rock. I wonder what the concentration is in a land-fill...
I'm still waiting for the oil to run out like my third grade teacher in 1975 promised would happen by the year 1990.
Closer and less mass of object means less fuel and round-trip time, seems to me the biggest practical factor in starting out in space-mining business. Investments are always limited and a project like these are huge, set up a working system and have a steady flow of income ASAP is mandatory. Spending too much on anything particular seems to me the main cause of failure.
Keep equipment simple, small and modular. Use robotics only. This way if something brakes down, and it will, other machines will proceed. Also, this way systems can be replaced/upgraded more easily with no or at-least less production loss.
Of-course, knowing which asteroid is the best choice to start with considering the current and future markets for valuable elements, minimal, maximum distance and cycle time of object, possible presence of resources useful for fuel, is very important to succeed.
Personally i always thought NASA or ESA should be doing this, once proper system is in place it will probably pay for itself and for future upgrades and expansions. Eventually they won't need any tax funding and can do any scientific experiment, exploration, etc they wish.
All this and by getting much needed resources they do a good deed for humanity at the same time. (wohoo!)
...we could bring those materials from asteroids, or other planets!
Now can all the space program deniers admit that space is very important and that we should go there?
I hope there's sarcasm in there ...
..." i.e. "that's what it's supposed to do." Implementation is somewhat less ... exact.
The Market dictates that you always adopt the lowest-cost model of operation. Dumping your toxic manufacturing byproduct into the local water supply is much cheaper than processing it (ref: Love Canal.) We have common property - water, air, etc. Strict market adherence leads to the Tragedy of the Commons. Government forces are intended to provide a counterpressure where The Market leads us to very undesirable places.
The Ethanol Mandate is pandering to the corn lobby, and results from corruption in the government. Not a good example. Note also that I said "One of the functions of a government
so your telling me that once these elements are 'used' they just disappear off the face of the planet? lol what a joke, all you'll have to do is go rooting around through the piles of old electronics and pull the elements back out.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything. Stop treating it like it is theory at all in fact, because it has as much in common with real science as reading tea leaves does.
That's really inaccurate. While there are lots of people who call various human sociological/political theories "economics", that doesn't invalidate the economic principles based on science and math.
In particular, this story is about one of the most solid economic principles of all: Supply and demand. As demand increases relative to supply, price goes up. That is basically built directly on top the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, AKA the First Law of Thermodynamics. Matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Or, to use the colloguial version, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." It's probably the most fundamental principle in the physical sciences, and it leads directly to the dynamics of supply and demand. So comparing it to "reading tea leaves" is like... well, it's like calling sociological theories "economics".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Actually, since fusion itself is an endothermic nuclear reaction
Errr...ever heard of the sun? That is powered by fusion and looks pretty exothermic to me.
People keep on forgetting that profit was the prime motive in people colonized and crossed the world.
As these products become more and more rarefied, the more and more it will become lucrative to get ships out in space to mine asteroids, and hell, even MARS for Indium, Zinc, Platinum, Gallium, Hafnium, you name it. If one thing this solar system is chalk full of, and that is places to mine.
I do believe in human ingenuity and if we run out of these things on Earth, we're going to look for it in the nearest other places to find it, and WILL find it, with enough time and effort.
In the meantime, though, prices will rise and recycling firms will be probably a good investment, at least in the near-term future.
Holy fucking shit!!! ARRARHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
*Runs screaming while flailing hands*
Automated Self-replicating Moon Mining.
Take that mineral that only exists in 1 cubic meter of the earth's crust. You could mine the moon and send back a 1m^3 block of it in an Apollo type capsule and it would be worth like 1 trillion dollars and pay off any initial setup cost for setting up the initial seed factories that are needed on the moon.
All you need is robotic factories that build factories that build bigger factories that build more mining equipment that build more factories that build more specialized factories that build better mining equipment than can strip mine the whole damned moon and cover it with solar cells that can turn the moon into a giant disco ball in the sky that provides us with all the rare earth elements we need without having to tear up all of the earth's crust.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
All over we are suffering from a disposable economy. If the products were made with long life and re-use in mind then the landfills would be a minor issue. Products in use would be our material banks.
I still remember an old cartoon in National Lampoon with some guy leaning out of a helicopter drawing a bead on an Innu (their real name,) and laughing like hell.
It was totally tasteless then and politically incorrect as hell.
But the artist had drawn it so well, (the hunters obviously seemed to be having such a good time, [probably because he'd managed to combine 3 things, alcohol, tobacco and fire arms, into a single picture,]) that you just had to laugh.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
While you're basically right with what you're saying, all this "it's just a matter of the price" has its limits.
Oil has the same tendency, the oil that they have started digging now is much more expensive to get out of the ground than the 20$ a barrel they used to dig out a few years ago. (Ofcause the oil fields that were profitable at 20$ a barrel are now astronomically profitable at 130$ a barrel!)
And oil is a good example. Of course it works this way: Oil gets more expensive, so digging it out with more effort gets profitable. But when oil will cost, say, 1000$ a barrel the problem will not be solved this way. There're whole industries relying on the fact that oil does *not* cost that much and those will just collapse then. And basically it's the same with all industries. Of course you can replace things getting too expensive with other resources, but this isn't free either.
BTW: "Landfill mining" is rather expensive for many things. Once the stuff is in a landfill, it's mixed up with many different things in very variable percentages and processing these mixtures is hard. Much harder than ore mining, where you have a quite simple mixture in reliable proportions which can be mass-processed much more easily, even if the percentage of what you're after is much smaller. Actual *recycling* stuff by separating and collecting things *before* they get thrown into the Big Mess is much better and cheaper, but this can't be done after the fact.
Actually everyone having the most basic understanding of entropy should know that just throwing away any good produced from refined material is a terrible waste. There has been much energy invested to get it out of the great entropy pool and throwing it back there is always a bad idea.
Anyway, at the rate our consumption of resources gets higher and higher, they *will* be exhausted sooner or later. Maybe not in 10 or 20 years, but in 100 or 500 years, with or without recycling. And so the end of the world as we (in the richer parts of the world) know it *is* quite near, expressed in historical terms. Either we will have to go back to what we did in pre-industrial times (with a much smaller population) or go out into space and start to mine there. And since the latter can only be started as long as we still have a working and stable economy (since it requires cheap energy and huge up-front investments) I'm quite sure that we'll realize the actual problem only when it's too late and go through a total collapse back into the dark ages.
So, in the not-so-short term I totally agree with those who say we're doomed. But since I don't have children I don't really care. We are just crazy and greedy apes with no real social and political abilities except of exploiting and killing for shortsighted profit and totally lack the potential to survive in the long run.
That why there were 'old Francs' and 'new Francs'.
And the rate was that about 100 old Francs would buy you 1 new Franc. (Or was it 1000 to 1 :-)
That avoids the problem of having your currency being essentially worthless (like the Zimbabwean dollar is right now.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Exactly. The issue is not that gallium is getting "used up," the issue is that it's getting redistributed from ground ore into landfills. The process of that distribution is a human endeavor, thus it is subject to study by economics.
Gallium is currently more expensive to get out of landfills than it is to get out of the ground. That's fine, at one point it was too expensive to get out of the ground too. When it became economically advantageous to do so, people did it. Same with recovering from electronics.
The REAL physical limitation is not gallium, it is energy. As long as we have energy to spend, we can reuse and recycle gallium forever. If we run out of energy, it doesn't matter where the gallium is, we won't be able to use it.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Yeah... We might have to live with our current, crappy 720p/1080i HDTV and not upgrade to "full HD" of 1080p which oops actually now you need 1440p cause anything less sucks and is like living in the dark ages.
I say let consumer goods skyrocket in price and maybe people will learn that they can still enjoy life after they step off the never ending upgrade treadmill.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYeL3fowrHg [youtube.org]
--- Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
Think oil.. there is only a finite amount. It costs $143 a barrel. It's used in everything from gas, to plastic (petroleum products). Elements, gone... you name it. Copper has gotten so expensive, that thieves are stealing the wiring from churches to sell to recyclers http://www.topix.com/forum/city/sanderson-fl/T55O1AF1U1DOLSDGK .. so when copper is gone, do we have a ready replacement to wire homes, cars, tvs, stereo's... And we throw it all away.
Give it another 20-40 years, and today's Landfills, will be Mining Operations in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Awesome!
Aren't As-Ga semiconductors supposed to become obsolete by 2020 though?
If Coal and Bauxite are being produced trace amounts of Gallium will always exist.
Actually, January 2008 is the new May 2005.
Indium is derogatory. The accepted term is Native Americium.
1. Maybe this is what's meant by "Rare", aye?
2. This exact panic has been *repeatedly* revisited with copper- "We're running out of copper!" and someone works out a workaround. "The Earth's supply of copper is exhausted!" and someone finds a way to recycle it and at the same time opens a new, bigger vein of copper in some other country.
I'm not saying all these things are infinite...just that there are more than enough news stories telling us how we should panic about a bunch of things that aren't as bad as they're reported, and this is one of them. It's an election year- I just heard one of the gold merchants say "Experts say gold might hit $2,000 or even as high as $6,000!" (If it got to $6,000 it'd be because of an apocalypse where it didn't matter any more.)
Just relax; it's nowhere NEAR as bad as the news suggests. Keywords to listen for are "Experts say..." and "blah, blah, blah, surprising experts!" It's just another hoax.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
It's not running out gee it'll just cost more. People are whining about the cost of iPhones. What if the average cell phone cost $2,500? I remember when the first pocket sized ones cost that. The point is we got used to cheap electronics. There's a massive amount of copper available but the demand is even higher. Cost will drop demand but that cost will make products that are cheap now out of reach of most people. It's one thing to get an ounce of metal by processing two tons of ore or dirt it's another when you have to process 20 tons of trash. Instead of throwing away electronics everything needs to be recycled now. The planet is sustainable it's our throw away culture that isn't.
OK, listen up:
1) Indium is not found in nature by itself, it is only found in combination with ores of Pb, Zn, Cu, Sn and other base metals. It is extracted from the metal ores.
2) If you don't believe that higher prices increase available supply, read this:
For primarily economic reasons, indium was originally only extracted from zinc and lead concentrates containing at least 500 ppm indium (and coming from ores containing about 50 ppm of indium). Due to improvements in the extraction technology combined with the economics of higher prices Indium is now recovered as a by-product of a wider range of base metals including tin, copper and other polymetallic deposits. Indium is also now being extracted from base metal concentrates containing as little as 100 ppm of indium.
Furthermore:
Base metal consumption has increased over the last few years and mining companies have started making positive financial returns. This profitability, in turn, has prompted new investments in mining. Furthermore, new indium containing ore bodies are being discovered and developed. As examples, note the new Neves Corvo Zinc mine in Portugal, Mitsui Mining's increased mining output in Peru, the Chinese exploration investments in the Guanxi and Yunnan provinces, the Chelyabinsk Zinc purchase of a majority stake in lead and zinc mine Nova Zinc of Kazakhstan, etc. Mining output is increasing, increasing supplies of indium containing feedstock.
3) What has been the price history of Indium? It peaked at $400/kg in 1996, went down to $100 in 2002, peaked again at near $1000 in 2005, and was down to $850 in 2007. As of June 27, Metal Bulletin has it trading at $620-680 per kg.
4) What has been the supply history of Indium? It is up from 250 MT in 1996 to 1,100 MT in 2007. More is being produced every year.
5) What about the future?
A number of smelters have accumulated large amounts of tailings and slags over the years. Many of these are indium containing residues from their production that have very low indium content and/or are particularly difficult to treat. Again due to the higher indium prices and improving recovery process technology, these tailings and slags are now economical to treat. China, as an example, has started treating many of these residues.
The abundance of indium in the earth's crust is estimated to be 0.05 ppm for the continental and 0.072 ppm for the oceanic crust, respectively (Taylor and Mclennan 1985). This concentration is higher than the concentration of silver. Consider that silver is now produced at a rate of 20,000 tons per year...
Here is a Canadian mine re-opening to extract more Tin and Indium
I always thought of landfills as the next cycle of humanities oil reserve or archeological playground.
Guess that won't happen after all.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Is there really no alternative to the flat-screen technology we use now? What about organic LED screens? And, is there no material other than gallium which would serve? Is copper the only conductive metal?
Copper is used because it's better than any other fairly cheap alternative; but it's certainly not the only possibility. Couldn't we use fiber optic cables for network cables?
Would it be a drastic change in our standard of living to adopt alternatives like fiber optics and OLEDs?
Are people who invoke the free market really saying that? Have you summarized their views correctly?
How do you know they will respond that way? I doubt they would clamor for gov't intervention, because no government intervention would produce more gallium if none remains in the earth's surface.
The market system is not a dumb system, and anyone who knows anything about futures markets etc knows that they're certainly not reactionary. The market is predictive and attempts to use all available information of all discounted future price movements. (If you've never heard anything like that before, then you should read about it first). As a result, the market would start preparing for the exhaustion of zinc or any other elements years before it occurs, by increasing the price gradually and in advance so that the available stocks will go to the best available uses. That is the function of speculation, "futures markets (my emphasis)", and so on.
Let me answer a potential objection. What if there really is no alternative to indium, and we really are about to run out?
In that case, no economic system would produce more of it. The only issue would be how to allocate what we have, which is the function of prices. Suppose the price of indium or some other rare earth element skyrocketed years before its exhaustion (which always causes howls from the left: "SPECULATORS ARE DRIVING UP THE PRICE", but anyway). In that case, would companies really throw away huge sums of money by using now-expensive indium indiscriminately? Would companies use copper wires that are now 40x as expensive as fiber optics?
I'm not saying the market will solve all problems, but allocation of scarce resources is something it does fairly well.
Yeah yeah. Google "Paul Ehrlich" and "Julian Simon" and think back to when the world ran out of copper.
Interestingly enough, civilization can also "collapse" due to having "too plentiful" natural resources, namely when it has a militant neighbour which has no qualms of committing genocide in order to forever annex those resources.
Check out the paragraph titled "Minerals & Mining":
"Tibet has a significant share of the world's reserves of uranium, lithium, chromite, copper, borax, and iron. Tibet has proven deposits of 126 minerals" etc etc.
Guess why the Chinese Communist (now Nazional-socialist) Party won't let the wholly non-chinese Tibetan people regain their independence? Besides territorial expansionism being CCP's raison d'etre, the people really enriching themselves from the rape of Tibet are almost exclusively CCP cadres or their family.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Unobtainium is as rare as ever.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
In a food shortage where prices have shot up, it becomes profitable to put into use marginal land for agriculture that wasn't used before. In other words, production increases. So it would help to "cure the shortage". At the same time, wasteful consumption declines, for example, meat-eating in 3rd world countries declines, because producing one calorie of beef requires 9 calories of feedstock grain.
I'm certainly not trying to minimize the terrible hardship food prices have imposed on poor people, but I don't see how economics is to blame.
Of course, maybe the market theory of production increases in response to increased prices, is not correct. However your comment did not even correctly state the theory--instead you attributed a belief to "affluent conservatives" which they don't actually hold. I can see two possible reasons: 1) you are setting up a weak straw man; or 2) you do not know what they think, and you disagree with a mistaken notion of their views.
One more thing. It's worth noting that the food shortage was caused by two things: 1) a government ethanol program which diverted a large fraction of the corn product to auto fuels; and 2) sporadic flooding in various areas of the midwest which happens on occasion and is difficult to predict. One of those causes (the first) was a result of violating the market...
Finally, someone with actual numbers.
Hah! Another reason to tell people to give me their old stuff instead of me having to pay to get new things myself.
Really though, even when I do have lots of money I don't like to go out and buy every piece of crap. Some things make me really angry to see how wasteful they are, like specialty cooking things. Eggwave, cake pans that are shaped like a little house, fondu pots, anything that is meant to make one kind of thing you can buy at Wal Mart and you'll have fun making a whole bunch of onion blossoms or waffles but it'll just be one more thing to collect dust on the shelf and eventually get stuffed into the crawl space.
It's insane that corporations are gobbling up these materials so liberally and making all this garbage from iphones to 16 different crappy cellphones to make this 1 other cell phone sell better. USB missile launchers to poisonous love toys. Microsoft mice you'll just have to replace in a year because it's sure to have something go horribly wrong with it. The next hot new game console of the decade.
It's this bullshit that makes think away from my desire for privacy and free market and human rights to yearning for a unified, almighty world government where every thought and piece of material is debated over and eventually ruled down with an iron fist the size of Nebraska.
When you turn things into an intricate piece of electronics, they're stuck that way. It's just not possible to mass dissect integrated circuits for their raw elements, especially with any purity. We're never, ever going to have Star Trekesque replicators, there's no reason to believe we'll ever have a way to pulverize something neetly into the hundreds of elements that makes it up.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
This will provide a strong incentive for space exploration. So, keep using up those rare earth elements.
That's good news. Mining is environmentally destructive and extremely inefficient way to get metals anyway. When it stops being profitable at all, companies have to start mining garbage dumps.
There's a lot of metal buried in diaper mountains all over the world. And while they at it, they can separate all the plastics, chemicals and biodegradable waste.
I heard on the radio today that the demand for gasoline in the USA has dropped by 2% over last year.
It's happening. It took a bit to find how elastic our demand for gasoline is, but we've hit it.
I see gasoline still going to go up for the next few years, mostly because it takes time to rework fleets - Hybrids and small cars are selling like hotcakes, but the average lifespan for a car is 5-10 years. We're about 2-3 years from when hybrids were mostly special purpose, sold for government fleets or for (as coined on another board) the smug factor.
Still, there's going to be substantial upward pressure in the form of China and India industrializing and developing a middle class capable of affording vehicles - like the Tata. The vehicles can sipp fuel like a moped and the sheer fact that there's more than 10X of them will swamp anything Americans, Europeans, Russians can do in the form of near-term conservation.
Darn it, can't anybody invent a battery that stores twice as much power at half the cost with a decent lifespan? ;)
I don't read AC A human right
I'll laugh if Canada starts asking for their garbage back, LOL.
http://madcanuck.blogspot.com/2005/04/canadas-biggest-export-to-america.html
There's more info if you google for it.
I believe the list has forgotten one other element ....
By what year will we have run out of hasselhoff?
- Mr. Anonymous Coward ... which still makes me an anonymous coward .... darn. I thought I had it there ... \:-|
-- or is it Mr. Too Lazy to create an account)
--- or better yet, I read the article in slashdot about our privacy only being as good as the people who keep it
Probably won't happen to modern tailings anytime soon. The efficiency of most modern concentration and extraction methods is over 80%. That means that for a Cu mine with a mine grade at 0.5%, you're left with less than 0.1% in your tailings. Minable grade is going down, but it's still at about 0.4%, higher if you only have unoxidized ore. The cost of mining tailing is reduced somewhat by the fact that it's already crushed, etc. but I think we're a ways away from mining modern tailings (in the last 25-30 years, or so). Historical tailings, sure, but not modern ones.
Just keep some indium, just in case it is needed to build whatever is necessary to build to harvest indium from the moon. ;-)
Actually, I'm even more concerned with the supplies of manganese. Even the manganese producers state that world supplies will last for a mere 40 more years or so (something they see as very far away though). As it happens, manganese is absolutely critical for making stainless steel. And when the steel rusts, the manganese disappears into practically unreachable metal salts (due to dilution out into the environment). So, in 40 years or so, the technosphere will have to do without stainless steel...
Another natural resource in danger. We should all take the day off to collect twinkies and cockroaches and duct tape the lot together for safe keeping. We will exhaust resources, that's what we do. But, we'll work to find other resources, because we do that too. One way or another, we'll go on. Because that's just what . we . do. (Until we run out of twinkies and roaches. Then we're just screwed).
This article is riddled with factual errors.
Gallium - is not used to make computer screens. Indium is.
We use a lot of Hafnium in computer chips The total volume of Hafnium in your intel 45nm CPU is approximately 1e-7cmÂ. Yes, recycling ten million CPUs will yield around 13g of Hafnium - value approx 2$. The current world reserved are estimated to be in the order of ONE MILLION TONS.
p.s.: For reliable data go here:http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/
If it were done forwards, that would be burping, not farting
The article is a load of bunk, and assumes that no new (or even existing undeveloped) deposits will be found or developed.
For instance, the article lists platinum as running out in 15 years. Given that only about 8 cubic metres are produced a year, that means that only 120 cubic metres are left on the entire planet.
One of my clients has a property with reserves nearly 10 times the amount of Pt and other PGEs extracted in all of human history, at a cost hovering around 10 percent of the current market price for Pt. Sure, development takes time. In the western world, it can take 20 years just to jump through the regulatory hurdles. But it doesn't mean that the elements somehow don't exist.
We have tapped some 10^-6 of the earth geologically. These elements are far from running out in the physical sense, so for many more centuries, primary development economics will rule through supply, demand and extraction costs.
Recycle, Recycle, Recycle.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
This is baloney. I'm still using a CRT on my home computer, and several of my work computers.
People like you and I have better things to spend our money on than the hottest LCD panels. That's too bad, but that's also the way it is, and the way it ALWAYS has been. There's only one thing that makes this seem like more than the luxury it really is: we are used to it.
Gotta go. Late for an appointment. No time to edit.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Maybe not in the classic sense of turning iron to gold, but hear me out.
This actually hit me back in grade school when we first learned about basic chemistry.
1) If all matter is essentially made up of the same stuff--protons, neutrons, and electrons--in different arrangements, couldn't there logically be some way to rearrange the particles into any substance we want?
2) Given the laws of conservation of both matter an energy, the resources we "use up" don't just magically disappear. They are either misplaced or transformed, So shouldn't we be able to some how recover the matter and energy in some way?
These two combined give me the impression that we should some how be able to turn anything into whatever we want, displacing less desirable or more abundant materials into ones of greater use.
I'm not so naive to think that it would be so simplistic. Obviously the actual process, feasibility and practicality is much more complicated, but simple logic seems to say that there must be some, if very advanced, way to create a sustainable resource cycle, much like every other sustainable cycle in nature.
The largest source of Helium is the natural gas wells in North America where helium has been made by radioactive decay of heavier elements over a very long time.
We'll have to wait a long time before we can get any more and recycling it isn't a possibility.
There is a little problem with transforming atoms of one material into another... you need to control fusion.
An approach I find much more realistic is the use of "intelligent materials", or heavy use of nanostructures. I just read at physorg about the fabrication of "artificial 2D atoms". Who knows what more wonders can we do with strategically placed atoms in structures? I'm sure that flat screens will give way to field emission displays that consist of arrays of nanotubes.
We must stop this theft at once!
Is some evil power transmuting these elements and turning them into Lead?
Or is is it an alien entity sucking them away from our planet?
Whatever- IT MUST STOP!
Next, they will be stealing our Copper and Iron!
And perhaps even our Carbon and Oxygen atoms!
.
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- aqk
F U
...minerals just sitting around between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
http://about.me/jimm.pratt
In our own solar system, there are probably enough quantities of these elements for millenia. Just don't forget to space travel.
I should be posting this anonymous, of course.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Well, at least it isn't quite as poisonous as Hg.
Does that mean we can expect countries that depend heavily on seafood to start going senile sooner? With the average life expectancy in Japan, that's not good news.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The fad these days is Global Warming. With rising gas prices, Oil is another popular one. This article could serve as a reminder that we are coming to the end of a bunch of things: wood, topsoil, clean drinking water, ozone (well, we sort of solved that, at least partially), clean air, open space, people with brains...
Jared Diamond's Collapse is highly recommended reading!
We live in interesting times.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
http://www.webelements.com/periodicity/abundance_seawater/ With solar/wind/wave power and new nanomembranes it will be viable to mine the sea for almost all rare elements.
My heatsink just got its own safe.