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Massive Rare Earth Deposit Found In Australia
An anonymous reader writes "A north Queensland mining company has discovered one of the world's largest deposits of the rare earth, scandium, used in fuel cells."
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A good summary would have told us *how* massive it was.
Instead I had to RTFA and find out that the article itself doesn't even tell us.
The amount of information in the summary and TFA could have fit in a tweet.
Unobtanium, a lazy sci-fi writers contribution to the element table that explains in one simple word how difficult it is to obtain the ore... except that they are able to obtain it.
God I hate that name for an element.
They'll need the extra money to pay off Lars Ulrich
That's nice, but scandium has only a few minor uses. A find of high-quality neodymium or europium ore would be much more interesting.
Going by the linked ABC article - and the fact the only thing the company has announced was it's annual report today (which isn't really news as the projects/mines would already have been known).
Scandium sells for $5,000/kg. According to the annual report, there is only current use of 5t a year (I assume worldwide). So that's only $25 million a year worth of output. That's pocket change for a mine.
.. if we found an ancient civilization's landfill.
Privacy begins with
http://www.metallicaminerals.com.au/board_of_directors
James Hetfield
Lars Ulrich
Kirk Hammett
Robert Trujillo
Let the suing being
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
...Message from White House...
Australia found to harbor terrorists. Military action advised.
"With scadnium selling currently selling for $5,000 a kilo, owner Metallica Metals says it will double the size of a planned cobalt and nickel mine at the site."
Metallica was right when they wrote 'Battery' many years ago..
Wait, so the Powerpuff Girls (formerly known as the Kickass Girls) are really from Down Under?
Another day of mining!
Looks like it's no longer...
*puts on sunglasses* ...scantium.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
but can you compete with the prices from China? Will your employees work for slave^H^H^H^H^H freedom wages?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They're planning to bury a keg of beer somewhere on the property then charge a 5'er for shovel rental. With any luck the shovel rental should pay for processing.
scandium is element 21, and its claim to fame is a great alloy with aluminum. It could be considered the best element to alloy with aluminum. However, Scandium is hard to find in good ores.
http://www.teamfortress.com/loosecanon/09.html
OK, it's rare. But at atomic number 21 I'm not clear how anyone can say it is in the rare earth group, those are much heavier elements.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
US invasion of Australia to commence in 3...2...1...
We've been over this before. The cost of rare earths does not have to do with their scarcity, but rather the cost of refining the ores into useful metals—it's a complicated process with lots of toxic chemicals.
"Rare Earths Tycoon"
Just after I registered peakscandium.com!
Guess all that criminal activity which caused the place to be inhabited was worth it now, eh? Streuth!
UpYours - http://www.upyoursnetwork.com
Scandi-lous!
*ducks*
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
... to welcome our new Aussie overlords.
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
>> Metric is convenient
You nailed it. All is about simple conversions.
aaaaaaa
It's actually a real word, that's been in use for many decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtainium
Yes, I agree that it shouldn't have been used for Avatar. But its use predated the movie.
In fact they are quite common. One of te big problem with rare earths is that if you extract them, you generally find them in company with thorium. Now even though it is naturally there, one you took it out of the ground you are obligated to treat it as a radioactive waste. You are not aloud to mix it back into the ground at the same consistency you found it. The result is that one of the few places on earth you can get rare earths is ... China. Who by the way is storing the thorium, and is moving ahead into building Gen IV reactors.
... byproduct. Now that is handy
In fact there is a dude that is petitioning to be allowed to extract "rare" earth metal and be allowed to store the thorium. This one mine will be able to produce all the energy the US needs as a
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/03/10/free-thorium/
So in other words the Unobtainium is just Applied Phlebotinum? Try saying THAT three times fast!
As for TFA, it looks like China trying to hoard all the rare earth metals is gonna bite them right in the ass. Nobody was really looking as long as China was selling, but the second they stopped suddenly it was worth looking for again. Isn't there a pretty big rare earth metal deposit in the USA as well? Of course they probably won't be allowed to dig it up, as we learned from all those superfund sites we got stuck with miners tend to be a little messy when it comes to the environment.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Do you mean the Mountain Pass mine ? Looks like it'll be up and running again by 2013, somewhat behind schedule. And yes, they've had quite a few enviro screwups over the years; let's hope they're smarter this time around. But in the short term, China isn't worried as, thanks to the shortsightedness of the US caving in to their cheaper REEs, there's not a lot of refining expertise left in America. So, many of the reactivated REE mines has been sending their product for final refinement to - yup, you guessed it - CHINA! Of course this state of affairs won't last forever but I don't think the Chinese are worried as they'll probably always be able to undercut the US market and it's not likely that rare earths are going to become useless anytime soon, especially since thorium is usually present, which they've been stockpiling for their nuclear research.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It's not that there isn't refining expertise left in America.
There is.
The problem is that it's expensive, because we have environmental regulations, because we have safety regulations to protect our workers -- China? I don't know if they technically do or not, but effectively they do not, and that means it's much, much cheaper to do all the dirty nasty dangerous refining over there and shit all over their environment. Because China likes money more than they like things living -- trees, grass, any individual Chinese person, etc etc.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
And how will this help me against the Creepers?
Suck on that, China!
True enough but there's more to it than that. China has been playing fast and loose with their currency for a very long time and it's only now I see there's an attempt by the US to take sanctions against them. Too bad they didn't think of this 10-15 years ago. Also, what's wrong with not buying from them until they clean up their act, and their mining practices. I have trouble seeing how this is any different from buying products knowingly made from slave labor, something which most of us would find reprehensible.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Bruce 1: Strewth mate, there's bloomin' tons of it! ... ... it's earth, cobber.
Bruce 2: Yeah mate, fair dinkum.
Bruce 1: So it's not rare, then?
Bruce 2: Nope.
Bruce 1: Blue ruin! So basically
Bruce 2:
Bruce 1: Pub?
Bruce 2: No worries!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
>> As for TFA, it looks like China trying to hoard all the rare earth metals is gonna bite them right in the ass. Nobody was really looking as long as China was selling
This is a common occurrence in the mining industry, when the public hears about a future shortage or someone comes in to corner the markets, the market fills in the demand.
a good documented case for this is Uranium in the late 40's to 50'. I do not have the fact's to link to, so please accept it with subject to validation: in the late 40's a report was issued from the US government stating that there was only a limited mine-able supply in the USA of Uranium. They (US GOV ) started making purchases contracts for future supplies with the mines at above market rates ( Hording mentality ). The markets reaction was more discoveries of Uranium, to the point where whatever was thought to be the entire supply, they already had it above ground and to be delivered.
Rarity is something that does not really occur too often, and in the metals aspect, the market's will find supply or change to another product.
Good example of this also is Diamonds, someone has figured out how to make them at highest quality levels. Next thing is most likely a good Gold substitute or Silver substitute ( I'm thinking something like an alloy lead/graphine product )
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Have gnu, will travel.
Location is here, in a former nickel-cobalt mine that operated from 1974 to 1992. It is one of several laterite-related nickel deposits in this area, which form by concentration of ultramafic (Fe-Mg-rich) rocks during chemical weathering in tropical conditions. Presumably they are considering reopening the mine mainly because of the scandium occurrence, or maybe they've found a better way to process the old tailings.
To quote from the official scriptment:
The backstory to Avatar was actually a lot more fleshed out and interesting than used in the movie, and they stuck to real science more than almost any other modern sci-fi that I can think of. As for "unobtanium": it's a room-temperature superconductor (probably the most likely thing on Earth for scientists and engineers to jokingly refer to as "unobtanium"). There are hints to that in the movie, such as when one character sets a piece of it down over a magnet and it floats in place. The backstory is that astronomers' attention was drawn to this moon because of the tremendous magnetic fields it was generating. A lot of the "ORLLY?" moments in the world are actually quite plausible given the concept of large deposits of a room-temperature superconductor underground -- a planetwide communication network, floating mountains (superconductors strongly expel magnetic fields), highly intense and uneven localized levels of magnetic field strength and radiation (and thus communication disruption), and so forth.
They really went to a ton of detail with the latest in scientific paradigms on pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. The spacecraft, for example. It's dual propulsion. For earth departure, it uses a photon sail pumped by a laser array at Earth, to accelerate the craft without it having to carry extra propellant for said acceleration. For decelaration, however, there is no such laser array, so instead it needs to provide its own thrust. For this, they use antimatter-initiated microfusion. All parts of the spacecraft are sized in proportion to what they'd actually need to be sized as to actually complete the journey. The craft is laid out in a very un-sci-fi-like fashion using tensile structures rather than rigid structures. First the sail, then the propellant/engine system for deceleration, all lie *ahead* of the craft, with the craft hanging in tension behind them. This can dramatically reduce system mass. The first system I read about like that, although there may have been others proposed before then, was "Medusa", a more efficient alternative to the popular "Orion" nuclear pulse propulsion system. Behind the spacecraft lies a reflective shield that protects it from the lasers used during the initial boost phase. During interstellar travel, it is then rotated to act as a shield against grains of interstellar dust. For the return trip, the antimatter and hydrogen are topped back up from locally-produced sources and used to boost it back up to 0.7c. At Earth, the photon sail and laser array is then used for deceleration.
Similar level of detail went into creating the biomes and evolutionary history of the different species, and pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, a lot of compromises were made in trying to wedge the plot in and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator :P. For example, the Navi were initially far less human-looking, in fitting with a realistic evolutionary development pattern. This was changed to help the audience bond with them better. One can only likewise expect similar compromises in the Na'vi speaking so much in English, the human being the "big damn hero", and other unrealistic audience-identification-with-characters aspects. I find it a shame that there's no way to get a "not dumbed down" version.
As a side note, I found it interesting to read that the visual similarities between the
Next to my desk we have an Ire Extinguisher. Our boss is really assertive, so we like the idea of having it.
Slave labor will always be cheaper, regardless of the regs.
China? Everybody knows Un'goro Crater is the best place for that stuff.
...Russia and China have returned from suddenly running off to change their underpants. Both claim to have eaten "too many tacos," while Australia replied, "Ch-CHING."
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I just want to celebrate.
Where is it going to be refined?
(Sorry, I'm a geologist. Little details like that occur to me, and just might be important. But what would I know?)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"