251–260 of 261 posts
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There are roughly 85,000 mines in the U.S. Of those, 62,000 are outright abandoned. Rest are either nonproducing, temporarily idled, sealed, or intermittently active. Only about 6,300 are currently active. It's not a limited resource problem but a profitability problem. Think the main article's point is that you probably want to research diversifying now before a resource squeeze forces you to catch-up.
There was a specific policy of discouraging mining in the U.S. sometime mid-century or earlier. The history of mining in the West can be pieced together from hundreds of different online sources. The BLM spins the story that all the old mines have all been worked out and that is why they were abandoned, which is believable, but certainly not the case, although some mines have been worked out. http://www.miningartifac…
1971 475 closures
1972 725 "
1973 692 "
1974 455 "
1975 711 "
1976 1,406 "
1977 1,248 "
1978 2,750 "
1979 5,378 "
1980 4,232 "
1981 2,901 "
1982 3,681 "
1983 2,598 "
1984 2,990 "
1985 4,401 "
1986 2,539 "
1987 1,944 "
1988 2,007 "
1989 1,855 "
1990 1,805 "
1991 1,879 "
1992 1,705 "
1993 1,425 "
1994 1,329 "
1995 1,212 "
1996 1,116 "
1997 1,013 "
1998 994 "
1999 1,151 "
2000 1,041 "
2001 1,368 "
2002 1,521 "
2003 1,450 "
2004 1,266 "
2005 1,298 "
2006 1,431 "
2007 1,465 "
2008 1,564 "
2009 1,664 "
2010 1,669 "
2011 1,894 "
2012 2,371 "
2013 2,752 "
2014 3,636 "
2015 2,622 "
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>Land is one of the single most limited resources we have. It sounds romantic but is it really ? Even agricultural land is relatively cheap and there are more scarce resources that are needed for development.
Cheapness isn’t a measure of importance though. Air is cheap. Water is cheap. That doesn’t mean it’s ok to squander and pollute cheap but essential and very expensive to renew resources until they are not cheap anymore. Water and soil in particular are very important resources to protect, far beyond their price in economic terms. They are vital strategic assets because so much of our economy and ecology depend on the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheapness isn’t a measure of importance though. Air is cheap. Water is cheap. That doesn’t mean it’s ok to squander and pollute cheap but essential and very expensive to renew resources until they are not cheap anymore. Water and soil in particular are very important resources to protect, far beyond their price in economic terms. They are vital strategic assets because so much of our economy and ecology depend on the…
In this case it's a good estimate of scarcity, unlike air, land is property
We see this with oil prices. The price across the demand/supply balance point is nothing like linear.
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“In the near future, atmospheric CO2 will be recycled to create organic fuel” That’s been around for quite a while already; you’re describing a tree.
yes but... 3D printed by a neural net at Trees.com ON A BLOCKCHAIN and crowdsourced with a Kickstarter from curated ambi-sexual SanFran hipsters, avail in 5 colors for pre-order at a low low annual subscription add-on for Prime members of $79.99
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In this case it's a good estimate of scarcity, unlike air, land is property
Not necessarily. If there is 110% as much food as people need food can be cheap, the surplus has little to no value. The price is making not determined by infrastructural constraints and personal preferences. But if there is 1% less food than people need the price will suddenly go through the roof. We see this with oil prices. The price across the demand/supply balance point is nothing like linear.
There are plenty of mechanism to stabilize the price, plenty of alternative ways to produce food as price increases just like with Oil
I know that the popsci media can overblow this, but wasn't there some optimistic results for super-capacitors that wouldn't rely on any of these rare-earth metals? I'm seriously asking, since looking this up tends to bring up links to crap-sites like IFLS and whatnot, so I don't know if the hype is warranted.
Glad someone asked. Supercapacitors are the thing that halves the requirement for these lithium iron batteries that we are supposed to be running out of. The good news is that fantastic work is being done in this area, making those Tesla things rather quaint old technology. It is all going on in Estonia and you are well advised to watch this recent episode of Fully Charged to see what a wonderful place Estonia is and…
That's patently false, though. Skeleton claims they have legitimately impressive power/weight ratios, but that's totally irrelevant to vehicles. The current batteries can push short bursts of well over 2 kW/kg. Even the smallest cars (the Smart FourTwo has a 50-100 kW engine) can be powered by tiny batteries (10-15 kWh). Cruising range is the deciding factor in battery size, and capacitors are totally irrelevant to that. The electric FourTwo could be fitted with a 10 kWh battery, but nobody really wants To really drive the point home, there are readily available batteries that have 5x the specific power of the batteries used in EVs, and only ~20% less capacity. They aren't used, because the extra power is not required.
[1]: https://www.skeletontech.com/skeleton-blog/ultracapacitors-o...
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Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. And of course Toxic is not a problem because most of the metals a rare earth mine would deal with would be toxic. You can actually find heavily concentrated earth in the US that would basically count as nuclear waste because nuclear policy is so insane.
> Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. Eh, you're technically correct in the sense that you can also make a bed out of asbestos and sleep on it and be fine, as long as it doesn't become airborne. Sure, you won't get thorium in your system as quickly but it's still a material that you probably don't want in your household or in the environ…
So not having a domestic rare earth industry because of thorium regulation is totally insane.
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Thorium is radioactive, just not very much. It's toxic in the way a lot of heavy metals are. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp147.pdf
can't we use thorium to make thorium reactors to charge or shiny new electric cars?