Slashdot Mirror
US Gives $120M For Lab To Tackle Rare Earth Shortages
coondoggie writes "With China once again playing games with the rare earth materials it largely holds sway over, the U.S. Department of Energy today said it would set up a research and development hub that will bring together all manner of experts to help address the situation. The DOE awarded $120 million to Ames Laboratory to set up an Energy Innovation Hub that will develop solutions to the domestic shortages of rare earth metals and other materials critical for U.S. energy security, the DOE stated."
today works like this: bribe local authoritites and enslave miners in third world countries while destroying the environment, then let criminal organizations export them back to the us, like the blood diamonds; there is a huge black market out there.
Well funded R&D can bring us amazing advancements, I only hope this project succeeds and stops the illegal mining and the black market in the same vein of the synthetic latex.
The goal in this case is to obtain materials.
No, that is not the goal. The goal of the research is to reduce or eliminate the need for the rare earth metals.
China is not the leader because they have the only rare earths, but because low labor costs made it cheaper to mine them there.
It's a mixture of several things:
* low labour costs
* lax safety standards
* lax environmental standards
* goverment subsidy plus dumping to put everyone else out of business
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Not necessarily. Probably not in the medium term, and in the long term there is no comparison.
The biggest barriers to asteroid mining are the high cost of surface to orbit transit and a lack of orbital infrastructure. When a fully mechanized asteroid capture and processing system makes it past those hurdles, though that may take a while, the price of scaling everything up starts dropping to free:
- There is no superlinear increase in mining cost with increased extraction, since the robots can cherrypick small asteroids that are easy to drill through.
- There's far more of every nonorganic resource out there, in relatively easy reach, than we could possibly need. Even into the fairly distant future.
- Most if not all of the infrastructure will become useful for things other than asteroid mining: Science, space tourism, solar and horticultural farms, manufacturing, colonization, etc. The pressure problem renders this bonus nearly nonexistent for undersea infrastructure.
- Sending mountains of mined ore back down is free. Don't give me that look.
In contrast:
- Anything sent into space only needs to withstand only one to zero atmospheres of pressure, while sea mining requires pressure changes hundreds to thousands of times larger.
- Objects in space are easier to track and can be surveyed by external instruments in the event of system failures.
- Smartly repurposed mining slag from asteroids won't pollute our biosphere the way it might underwater.
- Robots sink to the sea floor, but megatons of heavy ore will have to fight gravity bitterly for every meter to the surface.
And as far as I'm aware, in space there are significantly fewer house-sized monsters with a taste for cable sheathing.
Here is a thought. The US is a capitalistic society. Why is the government funding this? If there is a resource shortage, isn't the private sector the solution? Or is it that the private sector is only the solution once all the hard stuff has been paid for by the taxpayer?