Rare Earth Elements Found In Jamaican Mud 100
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."
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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.
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"natural disaster" (Score:2)
Or . . . how long until we need to send a massive force there after a "natural disaster" to help out.
Oh, that can be arranged ...
Re:"natural disaster" (Score:5, Funny)
First, fly to Brazil and obtain a butterfly...
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Next, teach it the dance moves from gangnam style...
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In the old days one might interpret "massive force" as military. I think we could go straight to a massive corporate presence as it is they who control things anyway. If that doesn't work then we have trade sanctions, etc and finally the military. If this scenario is not for today, my guess is it will be soon.
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Academi, formerly known as Xe, formerly known as Blackwater -- killing people, for money !
Ahoy !!
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Luckily, Jamaican people really do need to be liberated from violent crime. Especially gay Jamaican people.
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Mali is essentially a failed state with islamic jihadis fronting the "revolution". Nice guys, those.
If they take over, nobody will mine anything in their religious paradise on earth.
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You mean, let's see how long until we declare that the Jamaican people need to be "liberated".
Probably never. We only "liberate" countries that resist our influence and don't have the military might to get away with it. I could be wrong, but I don't recall hearing anything to suggest that Jamaica's leaders were no longer for sale to the US.
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Check out the gadolinium reading . . . (Score:2)
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"We'll offer to trade their supply for some *xx-iron-xx* lead."
/Sorry, /. doesn't do <strike>
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element
they are called such because outdated naming conventions. They are all over the globe, and very common. They are "rare" because they never occur in any more than trace amounts, and its a great effort to refine them, and tons of dirt to dig to get them
In fact the largest mine used to be in california, before it got shut down for enviromental reasons, like what the chineese are doing now with their mines.
Jamaican Rum is like... (Score:5, Funny)
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Awww, man (Score:1)
There goes my investment in Bucky Balls.
"continue to search for and find other deposits" (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:"continue to search for and find other deposits (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/business/energy-environment/09rareside.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
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
Re:"continue to search for and find other deposits (Score:5, Informative)
"Rare earths" aren't really all that rare. What's rare is finding them in high concentrations.
Re:"continue to search for and find other deposits (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I thought what was rare was finding them in high concentrations in places where labor is cheap and environmental laws lax.
Re:"continue to search for and find other deposits (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
Re:"continue to search for and find other deposits (Score:4, Informative)
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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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
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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.
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The free market says eliminate the subsidies - farmers will figure out for themselves whether it still makes sense to grow corn.
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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...
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/ in a country that is willing to overlook the environmental and health issues.
"high concentrations" are still low... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Hardly. That testing costs money, and most of it is residue from decades before the rare earths were relevant.
Just ask how the Culliname was found. Sheer dumb luck.
Well Hurray for Mud! (Score:2)
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.
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It's official. We have discovered Elbonia. Soon, Jamaica's principal export will be mud.
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You are from Elbonia?
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Maybe not (Score:2)
the USA has it too (Score:1)
.
Pretty much strip mine and use the other guys/gals stu
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Hell, diamonds and emeralds are sprinkled all throughout the carolinas too
Is it really that bad in the Carolinas?
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Haha. As a Californian, I can sympathize with west-coastie-toasties who do feel that being stuck in the Carolinas is "hell",
Funny, I was thinking the same thing about being stuck in California... ;)
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Hell yes! Sapphires too. Even gold mines (one of the largest gold mines in the world prior to the California gold rush is a few miles from where I'm sitting). But you do have to watch out if you want to mine any of this stuff, or you'll catch hell.
North Carolina has Uranium as well, but there is so strong a NIMBY movement that any politician that suggested that we mine it and achieve energy independence in the state would find himself going to hell in a handbasket. Thorium too -- in the form of Monzanit
Rare Earths (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Rare Earths (Score:4, Interesting)
Thorium? Problem?
I thought there was a potential nuclear fuel cycle under development that uses Thorium. So, while it may require some special handling, it has value and isn't a waste product to be dealt with.
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Thorium's not particularly rare either. And like most radioactive material it's far too big a pain-in-the-ass to bother with actually stockpiling it long term. The long term costs of string it will almost always exceed the cost of just refining it when needed.
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Since there is virtually no market for thorium at present (world trade figures are in the single digit tons), and none for the foreseeable future, it is a waste product that must be dealt with.
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it has value and isn't a waste product to be dealt with
the interests that control the USG are against the development of thorium-cycle reactors. And the USG will kill people to see to it that thorium-cycle reactors aren't available on a commercial scale anytime soon. Anybody who thinks this is incorrect is welcome to go ahead and start building one without their permission - if you have a way to succeed let me know and I'll invest!
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the interests that control the USG are against the development of thorium-cycle reactors. And the USG will kill people to see to it that thorium-cycle reactors aren't available on a commercial scale anytime soon.
Which is why the U.S. is active in the international Generation IV reactor research effort, that includes thorium powered designs?
http://www.gen-4.org/ [gen-4.org]
http://www.gen-4.org/Technology/systems/msr.htm [gen-4.org]
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The US/US industry doesn't care about thorium reactors - the industry is only interested in the Integral Fast Reactor, burning uranium. At least IFR can burn nuclear waste, so it isn't a total loss, but we've already lost the race to develop them to Russia by continuously canceling our test reactors (Russia has two ~2000MW online and is building a full scale reactor from what I remember). The industry estimates that IFRs burning just nuclear wast can power the world for 1500 years. When the US (and British)
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There is a major difference between talk and prototyping. We built small scale prototypes of liquid thorium salt reactors forty or fifty years ago, but politics shut down the development when money was requested to go the next step and build a prototype to scale. We could pick up where we left off in less than a year if money were committed not to paper research that delays the project indefinitely but to prototyping and practical engineering, actually building one or more of the damn things and tinkerin
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China isn't "ignoring" the problem, they're refining and stockpiling the thorium. If their molten-salt reactor research pays off, they'll have decades of supply on hand.
If not, they can use it in CANDU-style reactors.
Failed operation (Score:5, Informative)
Bauxite scandal in India (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/how-big-business-gets-its-way [openthemagazine.com]
Locals jailed for all kinds of silly reasons if they opposed the mining.
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Isn't it... funny... how the adorable little theories about 'contracts' and 'consenting parties' dissolve when they hit the ground?
Oh no! (Score:1)
I hope it pans out for them (Score:3)
Jamaica could stand some good luck for a change.
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Next step... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Unless other countries finally say fuck this and put tariffs on Chinese rare earths. I'm not a big fan of tariffs for protectionism, but punitive tariffs can be pretty useful.
China's doing fine (Score:2)
Dig it! (Score:2)
Jamaica Man.
Like Diamonds (Score:2)
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.