Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

news.metal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 50 posts

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#21

Post by loufe »

sbierwagen wrote: post #17
philipkglass wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See pages 14 and 15 of this presentation: https://mric.jogmec.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/seminar... It's mostly light rare earth elements. Over half of it is cerium and most of the rest is lanthanum. Most of the economic value is in the elements that are not cerium or lanthanum. It appears to have about the same proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (valuable light rare earth elements used in magnets) as the…

Also on that slide: "has average 3.14% grade". I assume that doesn't mean the rock consists of 3.14% of the target element, but is 3.14% of whatever ore they're targeting, right?

You're right, there's no way they would not tout the "15% grade" of the actual ore, if by some miracle there was 3.14% grade the entirety of their staked land.

Ore is by definition the "economically feasible/interesting" subsection of the rock covered by the claim.

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#22

Post by bayesian_horse »

hrkucuk wrote: post #20

God damn. If nothing this will be used to make ppl force vote for Erdogan in 2023... Just another propoganda tool to vote him :( And I was naively keeping up my hopes for this Turkey's 100th birthday elections, but it seems like he will follow a Nazarbayev model for himself. I can only hope him to get pulled into his bubble where he leaves important decisions to liable, honest people. But unless his "magistrates" com…

I don't quite see how Erdogan would be any better at exploiting that resource than anybody else. Worse actually, because he'll have trouble attracting foreign investments...

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#23

Post by [deleted] »

tasuki wrote: post #7
rajandatta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be 694 million metric tonnes? I million megatons is a hell of a lot.

Probably metric tonnes, but it's weird to use "Mt" to mean metric tonne rather than megatonne. The symbol for metric tonne is "t" [0]. It would certainly be less ambiguous to just spell it out. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne

[deleted]

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#24

Post by dmitrygr »

gpcr1949 wrote: post #13
dmitrygr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You can't convert mass to energy like that in this context. A megaton just means a million tons (of TNT in an energy context). You can say: (the energy released when detonating) a megaton of TNT is equivalent to 46.55 g of pure mass to energy conversion (E = mc**2 type), but that would be irrelevant in this context because no one is planning converting this mass to energy, nor would it be possible.

No post body was provided.

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#25

Post by Barrera »

The article is vague about the identities of the elements. They tend to occur together, but some are way more valuable than others. Cerium, for example, is considered a "rare earth" but is not that rare at all:

> Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common metals such as lead (13 ppm) and tin (2.1 ppm). Thus, despite its position as one of the so-called rare-earth metals, cerium is actually not rare at all. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerium

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#27

Post by arcticbull »

Despite their name, rare earth elements aren't rare at all - in fact, they're all over the place. They're in the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam, China, India, Russia - and of course Turkey. [1]

Most of the refining takes place in China, though, because only China is willing to pay the toxic environmental cost associated with actually doing so. This is what that process looks like. [2]

It's good to diversify the supply to be sure, but the question is, will Turkey be willing to pay the environmental cost of refining? Or will China continue to take that on. We're not short of input ore, so if not, I suspect the market will continue to look much like it does in spite of this discovery.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rare-earth-elements-where-i...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#28

Post by moralestapia »

dmitrygr wrote: post #9
rajandatta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be 694 million metric tonnes? I million megatons is a hell of a lot.

Quoted post unavailable.

LOL, 46 tons would hardly ever be news, that's about the output of a medium-sized mine per minute.

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#29

Post by Victerius »

exabrial wrote: post #15

Looking at some of the concentrations for neodymium and praseodymium... why _isn't_ magnet recycling more of thing? Certainly extracting those elements from waste is cheaper than raw ore.

I have a bunch of old (5-15 yrs old) HDD hard drives in a closet. Would that help? I don't know what to do with them.

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#30

Post by vanattab »

Barrera wrote: post #25

The article is vague about the identities of the elements. They tend to occur together, but some are way more valuable than others. Cerium, for example, is considered a "rare earth" but is not that rare at all: > Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common metals such as lead…

Honest question. What is the distribution throughout the crust though? If something that is 66 ppm but near uniformily distributed could be much harder to extract then something that is 2.2 ppm but occurs I distinct viens.
Post reply on HN