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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."
Mudders Milk..
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.
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"
Hell, diamonds and emeralds are sprinkled all throughout the carolinas too
Is it really that bad in the Carolinas?
"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.
You mean, let's see how long until we declare that the Jamaican people need to be "liberated".
Or . . . how long until we need to send a massive force there after a "natural disaster" to help out.
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.
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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.
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.
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