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The Next Gold Rush Will Be 5,000 Feet Under the Sea, With Robot Drones (vice.com)
merbs writes: In Papua New Guinea, one well-financed, first-mover company is about to pioneer deep sea mining. And that will mean dispatching a fleet of giant remote-operated robotic miners 5,000 feet below the surface to harvest the riches scattered across ocean floor. These mammoth underwater vehicles look like they've been hauled off the set of a sci-fi film—think Avatar meets The Abyss. And they'll be dredging up copper, gold, and other valuable minerals, far beneath the gaze of human eyes.
Metal mining is the #1, #2 AND #3 most polluting industry. 14/15 largest superfund sites, etc. Primary barrier to cyanide treatment and tailing ponds is the property value of abutting land. This is what has driven mining out west in the USA, to rain forests, and now to the ocean, where no on can hear you scream.
Gently reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Indeed:
http://www.animals-zone.com/7-...
No concept what hit them, when it does.
This has to compete against mines on land operating with excellent infrastructure and somehow do it for less money.
I'm sorry but it just isn't going to happen any time soon. Olympic Dam in South Australia has absolutely massive gold, copper and uranium deposits but the economics of that mine couldn't be made to stack up in the current market. There is no way that untested, experimental mining in an incredibly hostile environment stands a chance.
Uh-huh. Gold is useful BECAUSE it isn't reactive. It is highly ductile, doesn't corrode quickly and it conducts electricity well.
Did a Russian sub go down around PNG?
It's both highly malleable and dense, so you can hammer it into really thin sheets for (relatively) lightweight radiation shielding.
Deep sea mining is GOING to happen, whether it is good for the environment or not. If environmentalists/scientists are afraid of its effects they need to work with companies/governments to ensure that it is done with as little damage as is feasible. Attempts to sabotage it with claims of doom and gloom or wrapping it up in untenable amounts of red tape will only succeed in creating another "us vs them" mentality where each side is constantly trying to screw over the other with lies and propaganda campaigns resulting in more damage to the economy & environment.
Silver oxidizes far more easily than Gold does. It also isn't anywhere nearly as ductile.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The whole thing about each gold rush is that for the most part anybody who could scrounge together some very basic equipment could strike out and attempt to make their fortune. We are talking shovels, and sifters not multi-million dollar underwater robots the size of a tank. Heck most people aren't even qualified to land jobs working on the ship.
It might have some great prospects and if you are already have a boatload of money and or a large corporation, it might make you a boatload more but a gold rush this is not.
That doesn't make a lot of sense, actually. It makes a lot more sense to use silver for this purpose. Silver is almost 20 times as abundant on Earth as gold. It's also very resistant to corrosion. Silver also conducts electricity better than gold. Because of all these advantages, it isn't especially logical to use gold for those purposes.
I can tell you don't own any real silver silverware...
We should be using tunnel boring machines for all our mining needs, gold, coal, whatever. Make them nuclear powered, and include a built in smelter.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I read this article all the time. They were not called drones then.
Exactly, people like to pile it up exactly for that reason.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Has everyone already forgotten the BP disaster of 2010? Last thing we need is millions of barrels of gold spilling up from the depths of the ocean, polluting our beaches and choking our marine life.
But silver is the best conductor.
In 1968, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine sank in the Pacific ocean. In the 1970s, the CIA built a ship, the Glomar Explorer, to attempt to recover this submarine. The CIA got Howard Hughes to provide a public front for the ship's construction. Its cover story was that it was going to mine manganese nodules off the ocean floor. As part of this cover, there was a massive disinformation campaign regarding the amount of valuable materials which could be mined (or vacuumed as some of the news stories described it) off the ocean floor. Newspaper and magazine articles proclaimed how by the turn of the century, we would be mining most of our metals from the ocean. Growing up in the 1970s as a kid extremely interested in ocean sciences, I read a huge number of these stories with fascination.
The cover for the operation was blown in 1975. But because of the disinformation campaign, it's still difficult to tell if these proposed mining operations have in fact accurately analyzed the financial viability of mining materials from the ocean floor. Or if they've been taken in by the hype generated as a cover story decades ago, and are assuming that if there were so many stories in major publications about the financial viability of ocean floor mining, that someone must've done their due diligence and concluded it was in fact financially viable. (As for the submarine, it broke while it was being hauled up to the surface, and the CIA only managed to recover about the front third of it. The more valuable conning tower section and propeller were lost. The recovered bow contained a couple nuclear torpedoes tough, so the CIA considered the operation one of their greatest successes of the Cold War.)
It might not be possible, but I'd go for using the sea creatures themselves. A interesting project would be to develop coral that accumulates heavy metals from the water. And then harvest the corals and "replant" them. It would be useful on two different sides. One would be removing toxic materials that might be accumulating because of illegal dumping. And the other is it would be more sustainable while providing jobs for people.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
what a disaster this will be for the ocean life for hundreds or thousands of miles around the site surely, not to mention any coral and deep sealife in the direct area, and whales and other migratory sea animals will be affected too
Hyperbolic much? Hundreds or thousands of miles around the site? They're dredges, not hydrogen bombs. Yes, they will create a mess - as does mining everywhere. It will be fairly localized. And likely remain a rounding error in the grand scheme of horrible things we do to the ocean floor (e.g. trawler fishing).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm not going to argue with that one, but oxidized silver doesn't conduct anywhere nearly as well.... Gold may not be quite as good at conduction at room temperature as silver, but the other tradeoffs make gold worthwhile, even though it costs much more.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I assume this means that a new Discovery Channel/Animal Planet "reality" show is just around the corner. "Underwater Gold", "Robot Miners", or something like that. It will be a nice complement to "Bering Sea Gold", "Bering Sea Gold: Under the Ice", "Ice Cold Gold", "Prospectors", "The Gold Rush", "Jungle Gold", "Yukon Gold", etc. (Yes, those are all real television shows. And yes, that is how stupid Discovery Channel and Animal Planet have gotten.)
While I agree that the area impacted will be very small, the damage will be quite great because each of these vents has a unique ecosystem around it. While I think they are originally going to concentrate at vents that are no longer active and not supporting life it won't be long until they move onto active vents.
Mile-High Tidal waves from the water Aliens as punishment... Where is Ed Harris to dive down and save us all??
Mining for gold like this is a fool's errand, as much as stocking up in warehouses in case the world ends.
Countries who do not have US (read US and other "free" nations) interests at heart control vast amounts of gold and other minerals which they CHOOSE to keep off the market for their own reasons. There is nothing stopping them from dumping their stock and making the bottom fall out of the markets at which point gold won't be worth mining or hoarding.
Everyone has to judge their own finances, but I find it absurd to considering investing in something like Gold where the value is set in large part by countries and peoples who would be happy if my country and people got vaporized. Now, everyone ELSE can invest in it if they want. I don't trust them and I won't invest in things I can't trust.
Sig for hire.
I wonder if it would end up being localised. Rough calculations based on their resource claims sees them having to bring thousands of tonnes of ore to the surface (each machine is worth about 60,000 tonne of gold ore). I wouldn't be surprised if the silt plumes were 100s of kms long as once the dredgers collect the ore it needs to be raised to the surface dropping silt the whole way.
...will be stealing the drones carrying gold....
Welcome our new robot overlords.
We've finally found a practical application for all of the robot fighting technology you see on those TV shows! It won't take long until those underwater robots have to be armed to defend against wildcatters.
So much gold that the price of gold worldwide decreases so much that their undersea operation becomes loss-making.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Which is why all of your electronics use silver interconnects, right?
Gold is used where corrosion is most important. Copper is used where conductivity and price are most important. Silver's marginally better conductivity over copper doesn't justify it's usage for bulk electronics purposes, and it's too corrosive-prone for use in interconnects. It sees some electronics usage, but generally gold and copper are more important.
Point of note: all of these measures are conductivity *per unit cross section*. However there are better metals than silver on a mass basis - sodium, for example, is 3x better. Then comes lithium, calcium, potassium, beryllium, aluminum, magnesium, copper, then silver, then gold. But of course most of those metals are extremely corrosion-prone/flammable and beryllium is absurdly expensive. Aluminum is widely used in wiring (including most transmission lines) due to its better mass conductivity and lower cost, but its mechanical properties make it not as "forgiving" as copper and more prone to shorts - hence the issues with aluminum home wiring over the years.
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Let's not kid ourselves, they are talking about a massive operation. They're supposed to fill up an ore carrier to China every 5 to 7 days. So that means they're ripping up the size of the ore carrier's cargo holds at least once weekly. The surface support vessel is designed to house up to 180 people. This isn't some tiny pilot operation, they're going full force on trying to demonstrate economic viability in the large scale.
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Actually, this company is Canadian. And they're selling the ore to the Chinese ;)
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Silver conducts a little better than gold, but interconnects need to be corrosion-free.
Somehow, I recall the deep ocean manganese fad in the 70's was a cover for snatching a sunken soviet sub from the Pacific floor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just wait 'til they start accidentally hitting the undersea cables and partitioning the internet......
resistance in a conductor is easy to engineer around but resistance due to corrosion isn't
love is just extroverted narcissism
Unlikely, as that is the result of a mine and so is likely one of the other 14.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
no concerns
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"