Slashdot Mirror
How Lasers Could Help Fingerprint Conflict Minerals
New submitter carmendrahl writes "Diamonds might get most of the media's attention, but they're not the only minerals being sold to underwrite militias. Two chemistry teams are developing portable instruments that can detect an elemental fingerprint in mineral ores, to verify that the samples don't come from militia-controlled mines. One technique uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (PDF), which vaporizes a small amount of an ore sample with a high-energy laser pulse, and detects elements in the sample by their characteristic light emission. The other technique couples the laser ablation to a mass measurement and a scanning electron microscope."
...use lasers to pew-pew the evil militia members.
Their they're doing there hair.
"Sorry, gentlemen your minerals are no good here."
"Now, show these fine gentlemen our pet sharks"
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
There are no conflict materials only conflict regions and conflict people. Solve that first. Stop vilifying rocks. Rocks don't kill people, people kill people.
JJ
Well-regulated ones should be OK...
Like DeBeers and their gemstone cartel of thugs will let this happen.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
A device that could detect minerals coming from Deidranna-controlled mines would be much more useful.
Find ore sample.
Blast with laser.
Analyze what happens.
Determine ore sample has other elements in proportions similar to ore samples taken from a certain location.
Any of the following will fool this method:
Perform a rudimentary refining pass on your ore samples to remove enough of said trace elements to fudge the signature.
Contaminate your ore slightly so its trace elements resemble those of ore samples from another region.
Not allow inspectors in to analyze soil and ore samples from your milita-run slave mine - this prevents them from generating a useful signature to compare against.
Do nothing: Men will buy women shiny rocks regardless of how they are dug out of the ground.
marketing by the diamond cartels.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/sharife230710.html
The targetted mineral in this analysis seem to be coltan (which is refined into tantalum for capacitors) used in the electronics assembly business. Unfortunatly, the electronics supply chain is so obtuse and full of counterfeits as lots of jelly bean components (commodity components like capacitors and resistors) are purchased on the spot-market by board assembly houses, and nobody seemed to care where the stuff comes from as long as the assembly house got a deal.
As an example of how messed up it can be, back in 1998, there was a terrible spike in bad electrolytic capacitors read the wiki about this. Nobody is sure where this stuff came from (although many suspect rogue suppliers that did industrial espionage). Tantalum capacitors tend to be physically smaller parts with even less labeling and counterfeits tend to be "mixed" in with real parts (or maybe the real parts are "cut" with counterfeits), so even lot identification is hard to do.
If people are serious about conflict materials like Coltan in the Congo, the real thing to do is to lower the demand for new electronic assemblies (just like people say reducing the new diamond demand is the only way to do anything about conflict diamonds). These are really just fungable commodities. If you don't buy the conflict version, someone will. As an example, I don't see people using laser spectroscopy on their gasoline to see if their crude oil was refined in Iraq, it's because it doesn't help.
Although folks may talk about labelling (e.g., like "free-trade-coffee" or "shade-grown") to inform consumers, people are just talking about the "beans" and rarely ask about the origin of the cloth "sack" holding the "beans". In a device like a iPhone the A5-chip and maybe the memory chips are the "beans" and the capacitor is sort of like the "sack". It holds the beans, but nobody thinks about it that much. Labelling doesn't get very far when you think of it like that.
I see all sorts of folks talking about reducing their footprint of other things (carbon, water, oil, etc), but I rarely see anyone saying that we shouldn't be buying the latest and greatest electronic do-hickys (kBlah8 just came out, I'm gonna to toss my kBlah7 and buy the new one). Maybe we should all be using our electronic whiz-bangs a bit longer to reduce the demand for these conflict minerals (and all the other environmental damage assembling new and disposing of old electronic do-hickys cause).
For example, it can be used to track samples of gold back to the mine where it was extracted; to track radiation sources back to where they were extracted, where they were refined, even down to the batch and position in the reactor. Every compound sample has a unique fingerprint which is the same as any other sample taken from the same batch. As long as you have a control sample (which is what they do for "conflict free" mineral ores otherwise they don't get to market), then you can match any random sample to the mine where it was first extracted.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
We could mount them on 747s!
They're interested in stopping diamonds trafficked by militias but the DeBeers mines are just fine.
Also, presumably, diamonds trafficked by nominally US-friendly death squad dictatorships are just fine.
Sounds like they're attempting to remove a funding source for resistance groups in Africa.
The diamond market is controlled by a cartel comprising de Beers and the Russians. They carefully control the supply and manipulate the price and sell through closed organisations of dealerships. It's also a one-way market. You can only sell diamonds at a fraction of their supposed market rate and there is a public brainwashing campaign to persuade people (well women mainly) to keep diamonds for ever. It's all a con. So what threatens this cosy state of affairs? Other African countries flooding the market with their equally good diamonds. Therefore they must be demonised. Since their diamonds cannot be criticised on quality the concept of "conflict diamonds" was invented. On the other hand dictators rich from oil-revenues are most welcome to spend their money on weaponry.