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Rare Earth Elements Found In Jamaican Mud
stevegee58 writes "Jamaica was once home to a thriving bauxite (aluminum ore) industry. While Jamaican bauxite mining may have fallen on hard times, it seems that the bauxite tailings in the form of red mud are rich in rare earth elements. Japanese researchers have discovered rare earth elements in high concentrations in this red mud and have already invested $3M in a pilot project to extract them. Perhaps Chinese dominance of rare earth deposits is on the wane as global manufacturers continue to search for and find other deposits of these valuable minerals."
Let's see how long somebody claims that the Rare Earth Elements are not rare.
We'll offer to trade their supply for some iron.
Mudders Milk..
There goes my investment in Bucky Balls.
You make it sound like China is the only place in the world for Rare Earth metal deposits. The United States has the largest known deposits of Rare Earth metals, with mining plans in the works as we speak.
Most important part of this story is extraction of rare earth metals that does not harm the local environment / still profitable
Must be quite low concentrations still, as otherwise they would have certainly known about it before. After all they've been mining bauxite there already, so certainly done a lot more research on that specific mud than on most of the rest of the mud on Earth.
Rare earth elements are in the usa also. Hell, diamonds and emeralds are sprinkled all throughout the carolinas too, but they're just not extracted. PArt of the reason for that is the cost of extraction. But another part of the reason is "hey why not let the other guy extract all of their mineral content and we BUY it from them, and save our own minerals for when they finally run out. Then we can use ours AND we won't have to share ours with them!"
.
Pretty much strip mine and use the other guys/gals stuff before we even touch our shares. (Like the mormons who keep a stockpile of grain and such to last them for a year or longer in case something drastic happens on this earth. Until then, they keep buying from the grocery store like everyone else. Use up other's resources before using up our own!)
Read up on Bukit Merah, Malaysia where rare earth metals where processed slag from old tin mines. ... :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/business/energy-environment/09rareside.html?_r=0
Thats the PR you have to face when you want to set up and "not harm the local environment"... in 201x
You wonder why press releases talk of not doing rare earth projects in Australia due to
power, water, chemical costs
for some reason they go back to 'other' parts of the world
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Go Team Jah!
A tsunami or earthquake soon, followed by militant compassion, aka US intervention.
"Rare earths" aren't really all that rare. What's rare is finding them in high concentrations.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Rare earths are NOT rare. They are in fact abundant in the crust.
The problem with these materials is that deposits of rare earths are usually associated with stuff like Thorium. This makes the mining waste rather annoying.
China has been willing to ignore this problem thereby cornering the market. Now they are getting the idea that being the world depository of rare earth mining waste may not be a good idea and are declining to sell to every Tom Disk and Harry at cut rate prices.
So folks are looking for alternatives. The bauxite one sounds interesting.
I'd love to wish that companies would not be so stupid as to leave 80,000 barrels of radioactive waste lying around, but like they say about wishing in one hand and peeing in another...
Funny, I thought what was rare was finding them in high concentrations in places where labor is cheap and environmental laws lax.
The Chinese government had grabbed the rare earth market by cutting down prices (yes, labor camps and lax pollution rules help). Then they restricted supply, attempting to force Western manufacturers to bring to China all productions of materials using rare earths. Within months, out-of-China RE production that was shut down because of cost resumed, and prices actually went down. It's all in this amusing article written by a guy who used to trade this stuff.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
FREE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM!
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/how-big-business-gets-its-way
Locals jailed for all kinds of silly reasons if they opposed the mining.
One less reason for the "we're running out of metals!" schizophrenics to trot out their tired Space Age "asteroid mining" propaganda....
The better description is that the rare earth metal industry is china is like the corn industry in the states. They have been subsidized to destroy the competition.
Or . . . how long until we need to send a massive force there after a "natural disaster" to help out.
Oh, that can be arranged ...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Jamaica could stand some good luck for a change.
#DeleteChrome
A Missouri mine for example. The mine is actually active again to an extent.
So, China created an artificial monopoly by selling below cost and driving all other producers out of business...
Then raised prices and restricted supply to drive costs up....
And the free market responded with new suppliers entering the market...
So China will let them spend billions of dollars developing their new sources, and we'll all go back to step 1 before they make a dimes worth of profit.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The subsidy part could be compared, but not the destroying competition. No one else even WANTS to grow corn to compete - the subsidy is because of all the farmers who don't know how to do anything else, so they keep growing it when no one even wants it.
Instead of selling "rare" earths for 1M times the extraction cost, they will tell 10x as much at only 500K extraction costs. Net win.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The place I live has an abundance of mud. The mud here is heavy and pitch black, and absolutely everywhere some 9 months of the year. It would probably be good for growing food if temperatures ever rose over 65 degrees. If only it were as useful as that rare Jamaican mud, this place would be rich.
I don't know if anyone recalls, but weren't the Japanese also responsible for finding rich deep sea deposits (the richest on Earth so far I believe) recently? Man, they must be looking for it really hard LOL Anything to beat the Chinese stranglehold is a good thing.
The tailings may be gravity seperated into conveniently concentrated layers especially if a lot of water was involved.
Wow, that's an even bigger waste of taxpayers money than I originally thought. Can't they use the money to educate the farmers how to grow something useful and which foodstuff will grow on their land?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
/ in a country that is willing to overlook the environmental and health issues.
That sounds HARD! Let's stick with what we know, please.
Rare Earth Elements aren't, by any stretch, Rare. Processing them has just been cost prohibitive, (from the sense that doing ANYTHING outside of China is cost-prohibitive). No one *cough* realised *cough* that a super power having an industrial growth-spurt might be a bad place to rely on for necessary ingredients in nearly all electronics being produced.
Hell, it was a few years ago that China said screw you guys, I'm going home, and keeping the Rare-Earth elements for our own factories, and we still haven't really started any development, (remember, planning != development). It's basically fiscal brinksmanship.
Large Companies, (who control 99% of the world's wealth), didn't start acting like idiotics in 2008.
Finding "rare" earths isn't that difficult. In this country, the problem is that rare earth elements (technically lanthanides) are invariably associated with the other f-series elements (the actinides), specifically thorium. Mining rare earths produces thorium oxide as a byproduct, and "disposing" of this ought-to-be-valuable stuff is a real difficulty. In China, it's less of a problem, for two reasons. First, it's apparently OK to dump radioactive waste in your local waterway, and second, the Chinese government doesn't shun all things nuclear. Like reactors, and bombs, and Oh Yes, thorium deposits.
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
This has already been noted, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Resort_%28U.S._TV_series%29 for details.
Apparently, it's turning out to be quite the drama.
CAPTCHA = salutes!
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
Are you saying that the issue is that there's no way of storing thorium acceptable to the regulators, or that you want to have the government responsible for handling the cost of storage? Because those are very different things: The first case is legitimately the regulator's fault, but the second case is businesses just trying to make the taxpayers pay their costs of doing business.
I am officially gone from
Jamaica Man.
Uhm why not just put the Thorium back into the mine, where it came from?
So Last Resort had some truth to it?
Reminds me of Diamonds. DeBeers got away with, in many cases, literal murder while having a near monopoly on the african diamond mines. As far as people knew then, that was the only place to get diamonds. Now they're showing up all over the place.
Been pretty good for the Northern Canadian economy, hopefully rare earth elements will do the same for Jamaica.
Obligatory Sum of All Fears quote.
Uhm why not just put the Thorium back into the mine, where it came from?
That is often impossible in an active mine, and in a strip mining situation there is no "mine" to put it into.
By its nature mining takes solid consolidated rock in which nasty materials are locked up (which is why they are there to be found in concentrated form) and turns it into powder from which is now easily leached or transported by water and wind. It is possible to find ways to secure the tails, but that costs money and drives up prices (making the product less competitive) or cuts into profits, both of which mining companies hate. Only strict outside (usually government) oversight keeps mining companies from turning most every mine site into a leaky, ugly toxic waste dump.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
To some, it is just dirt. To others, it is the dragon's hoard! If you want treasure, usually you don't have to go any further than your own back yard... :-)
Can't they use the money to educate the farmers how to grow something useful and which foodstuff will grow on their land?
But that's socialist command economy talk! Farmers should be allowed to grow whatever they want, that's a free market!
Now, finding rare earth deposits with almost no thorium in them is a real feat, and getting the US government to find ways to store thorium would a world-class miracle.
No, a world class miracle would be getting the U. S. government to fund the development of an LFTR that would provide the world with essentially unlimited cheap electricity, provide us with ample supples of rare earth elements and other exotic but useful isotopes as a side effect, generate almost no nuclear waste (LFTR consumes nearly all of the meso-scale "waste" like plutonium and turns it into energy), in a process that cannot melt down (the reaction just stops) in a reactor vessel that is not pressurized, using fuel that does not have to be hand assembled and delivered only by the company that made your reactor originally, at a small fraction of the cost of solid Uranium Oxide fuel, using reactions that make it relatively difficult to build bombs undetected, while eliminating world (energy) poverty without the use of carbon (whether or not you happen to think CO_2 is a problem, carbon fuels release more radioactivity than all the nuclear plants on earth combined times 100, soot, a variety of known carcinogens, teratogenic mercury, and acid precursors).
But no, we have to protect General Electric and Westinghouse and our ability to scavenge plutonium from expended and enormously expensive fuel. Big oil or coal is happy to invest all sorts of chump change in solar and wind projects because they know that they are not viable without subsidy and the subsidy is always enough to make them break even or win a bit economically without threatening their main profit stream. Thorium would disrupt the entire energy delivery system and drop the cost of energy in all forms dramatically, at the expense of huge recurring profits for some huge players that make equally huge contributions to the entire political establishment. So while storing thorium would make enormous sense, we will neither store it nor invest in using it until the need to do so exceeds the price of votes in Washington. Which, sadly, will be around a decade after the Chinese perfect the technology and market it to the entire world, including us, while maintaining a virtual monopoly on the heavier rare earths (as noted, almost always found with Thorium as a "pollutant"). Hell, even fusion might happen first, and that is an uphill battle all the way.
It's actually an excellent bellwether of the Green movement. At the moment, it is perfectly happy to condemn two billion plus of the world's population to continue to live in energy poverty so profound that they burn dung to cook on, wash clothes (if at all) by hand, and use oil lamps (if anything) to light the night while pushing enormous sums into technologies (like wind) that are visibly a major fail and will remain so into the indefinite future. They trumpet the dangers of CO_2 and catastrophic global warming in the distant future while perpetuating the ongoing real time catastrophe that affects over a third of the earth's population right now, while playing into the hands of the very agents that provide the carbon based power they demonize as the alternatives they push are not technologically or economically feasible (yet).
The one existing technology that "could" permit the continuation of civilization and reduction of global poverty while reducing CO_2 production at a feasible cost is nuclear (which is not a single technology but a many technologies, some of them the subject of research and development). Thorium based reactors are in a sense proven technology -- they were built back in the 60s and 70s and successfully run long enough to verify that they are indeed almost certainly a safe, meltdown-proof nuclear technology with far lower risks and far greater benefits in every category from cost to waste to nuclear proliferation -- but they do require four or five years of intensive research to complete an engineering cycle to scale. The day the Greens recognize this and take their foot off of the backs
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The free market says eliminate the subsidies - farmers will figure out for themselves whether it still makes sense to grow corn.
Redundancy is good And also good.
Actually, the first assertion is very close to the truth - the NRC highly regulates access to thorium because of proliferation concerns, even though you'd need a nuclear reactor to make it into a useable nuclear weapon and it wouldn't be terribly effective in a dirty bomb. China just dumps it into landfills. It is an insoluble metal, so worries about it getting into the water table (alpha emitters are only really only dangerous if ingested, and thorium is a relatively slow one) is probably a non-issue.
there are some rare elements in that for sure!
And now you understand why most American cattle are corn fed (even through grass is their natural food, healthier for the cattle and tastes better for the beef consumer), soft drinks use high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar, and fuel ethanol is based on corn instead of other significantly more efficient ethanol sources...
The United States has the largest known deposits of Rare Earth metals, with mining plans in the works as we speak.
And they were sold to the Chinese. (China is not done buying them yet.)
There's plenty of rare earths (including heavies) in North America.
THORIUM PROBLEM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyqYP6f66Mw
I don't doubt many folks on Slashdot have seen this already, but I'd hope we'd see REE posts focus on not so much WHERE REEs can be found, as WHY are they not being developed and separated into supply chain assets.
You think so; try to buy them- they all come from china. Unitl a politician figures out a way to line their pockets or finance a campaign- nothing will be done about it.
Islamist terrorists seeking to control worlds rare earth metal market via Jamaica. US launches pre-emptive war to bring democracy to Jamaica.