A secret on the ocean floor

No, like digging under Washington DC to build a fake transport tunnel, when you're really providing cover for putting new construction in place under the capitol that the US Govt doesn't want their enemies to know exists.

(I'm not saying that is occurring, just that that would be the more likely example)

Now I have to wonder if the downvotes are people not getting the sarcasm or are offended that I might be snarky about the mining industry.

With all the concerns in the OP, the many questions, many calls for more research, the speculations of disasters, the lack of lots of solid, detailed information, etc., where the UN, etc. can be involved doing much of anything on the ocean floor will be blocked for decades.

But there is an alternative: Use the TIFO method -- try it and find out.

So, pick some spots on the ocean floor. It's a huge ocean with lots of candidate spots.

At some of these spots, take a census of what is there. Gather some worms, crabs, shrimp, nodules, parts of hydrothermal vents, etc. Admit that these are not exhaustive or comprehensive but just samples.

Then at some of these spots where took the census, do the mining. Leave the other spots as controls.

Then take another census. Compare the mined spots with the controls. See what the changes and upsides and downsides are.

Since some of the candidate spots for mining are in the waters of sovereign countries and, thus, largely out of the control of the US, likely some of this TIFO work will be done and not blocked by the UN, etc.

Maybe then we will begin to find out.

There's justifiable, moderate concern for cobalt supply as a bottleneck when it comes to ramping up EV battery production with current popular lithium ion battery chemistries. "Every turbine and every panel also requires key metals" is a claim that's either false or trivial (perhaps they've defined "key metals" as "metals used to make wind turbines and solar panels.")

It's hard to have a sensible discussion about material supply constraints for renewable energy, EVs, and electronics because it's a lot easier to affirm a baseless panic than to reject it. Some years ago I saw a forum comment like "China has a rare earth monopoly and there's not enough neodymium for everyone in the world to have an iPod." One sentence of concentrated nonsense. It takes multiple paragraphs of carefully cited evidence to demonstrate why that's nonsense. You have to estimate mass of magnets in the device, carefully show your work to justify the estimate as reasonable, further break down magnet composition to find neodymium demand per device, link to citations for crustal abundance of neodymium, link to evidence of non-Chinese neodymium resources, link to evidence of historical mining outside China, show how much the bill-of-materials cost for raw neodymium can rise before it adds $5 to the iPod cost... If you skip any steps, there's a gap left for the "skeptic" to dodge your counter-argument and keep believing whatever they believed before.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of materials that I've seen asserted as being both in short supply and critical for the expansion of renewable energy:

- Neodymium

- Dysprosium

- "Rare earth metals," generically

- Indium

- Gallium

- Tellurium

- Lithium

Of those, I'd say that only dysprosium is even close. Adding a small amount of dysprosium to neodymium magnets permits the magnets to endure higher temperatures, which makes them better suited for high-power applications like permanent magnet generators in wind turbines. But PM generators are just a "nice to have" -- most wind turbines use electromagnets instead. Lithium is very useful but too abundant to worry about. The others just aren't very important to renewable energy technologies in the first place. Sure, there are solar cells that rely on gallium, but over 99% of the world's PV cell manufacturing does not use gallium. Most is based on silicon, which is extremely abundant.

There are a lot of incentives aligned to panic about shortages more often than makes sense. Stories in the popular press emphasize shortage and panic because "we're not running out of gallium" is not a story. Junior mining companies play on the panic to lure money -- "we're going to solve the rare earth crisis and make our investors rich!" Shills for the fossil fuel status quo tu quoque renewable energy: "greenies against coal never tell you that those wind turbines need filthy, dangerous mining too." Even several environmentalists of my acquaintance have swallowed this nonsense; perhaps they've seen so many bad examples that they're pre-primed to believe it when someone says that we're even running out of materials to make wind turbines and solar panels.

> But the US had given the command and control system for nuclear weapons to the Russians

But what does this mean? Why would they give it to the russians, and why would the russians accept it?