71–80 of 341 posts
Not exactly surprising that it’s in Sweden, as many rare earth metals were first discovered here and are named after Swedish things: - Scandium from Scandinavia - Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium and Ytterbium from the village of Ytterby - Holmium from Stockholm - Thulium from Thule
Quite impressive that little Sweden has found the second most elements in the world, 19 of them. https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/legac...
> If we look at how other permit processes have worked within our industry, it will be at least 10-15 years... When it takes 15 years simply to get permission to do something, you know that your country will never be competitive globally. Either the benefits outweigh the downsides, or vice versa. A group of 10 of the right experts ought to be able to decide that in a week. Spending 15 years paper-pushing, doing court…
There is also the sami peoples reindeer herding, safety, environmental impact, relocating, buying land. You could not decide things like this in a week if you have a system where human and ecological rights are respected.
Everything else is just details.
Isn't rare earth metals mining insanely pollutive? I've heard they can be found all over the world but only China mines them massively because nobody else is willing to destroy their ecology.
> If we look at how other permit processes have worked within our industry, it will be at least 10-15 years... When it takes 15 years simply to get permission to do something, you know that your country will never be competitive globally. Either the benefits outweigh the downsides, or vice versa. A group of 10 of the right experts ought to be able to decide that in a week. Spending 15 years paper-pushing, doing court…
I think Sweden is quite competitive in general. Also, as others have said, it could have pretty big impact on various things. But I guess if Sweden was a dictatorship the government could just decide to start digging and not care about the people living there or the environment. 10-15 years sounds very long though, but a week.. I don’t know in which country that would happen.
Kiruna has a long history about mining incl world war II importance for iron. Also due execessive minig the whole town needed to be moved: “In 2004, it was decided that the present centre of the municipality would have to be relocated to counter mining-related subsidence.[29] The relocation would be made gradually over the coming decade. On January 8, 2007, a new location was proposed, northwest to the foot of the Lu…
> "This is good news, not only for LKAB, the region and the Swedish people, but also for Europe and the climate... No, this is not good news. Mining is one of the most polluting human activities there is. In addition, all those machines used for digging and pulverizing the minerals, they run on petrol. In fact, the entire value chain from raw mineral to finished product, be it solar panels, wind turbine, or the lates…
"Rare" earth metals are actually not that rare. The reason we (in the west) don't mine much is that they are very dirty to refine. We don't want pools of toxic waste left over from refining all over the place but China etc will tolerate those. Given the ore itself is (ironically) quite common, all the mining happens where the refining happens because why would you bother shipping tonnes of ore there when is so common…
The ore is initially drilled and blasted and the blasted ore is excavated and loaded on to trucks. The trucks transport the mined ore to the concentration plant located 1.5km away from the mine.
The ore at the concentration plant is crushed before being fed to the ball bill, after which it undergoes flotation. The flotation concentrate is thickened and filtered and the final concentrate is subsequently shipped to the east coast of Malaysia to the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant in Kuantan, where the concentrate is processed [2] to produce separated Rare Earths Oxide (REO) products.
Step [2] is the significantly nasty step and typically occurs awy from mine sites that produce concentrates for input.
For further overview, see (for example): Rare Earth Elements: Overview of Mining, Mineralogy, Uses, Sustainability and Environmental Impact [3]
[1] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/mt-weld-rare-earth...
[2] https://lynasrareearths.com/about-us/locations/kuantan-malay...
"Rare" earth metals are actually not that rare. The reason we (in the west) don't mine much is that they are very dirty to refine. We don't want pools of toxic waste left over from refining all over the place but China etc will tolerate those. Given the ore itself is (ironically) quite common, all the mining happens where the refining happens because why would you bother shipping tonnes of ore there when is so common…
No, that's not the only reason. It's also just currently a lot cheaper in China, so European mines can't afford to operate (I believe due to the very low density of deposits), so we keep the closed in reserve. There's awareness that this is probably a strategic mistake but as far as I know nobody's doing anything about that yet.
A larger strategic mistake would be having lots of very large and both military and natural disaster vulnerable tailings ponds everywhere in your country "just because there is the possibility of a strategic mistake if we don't mine stuff".
It doesn't take more that a dozen of those Tailings dam failures to completely ruin a small country.
> "This is good news, not only for LKAB, the region and the Swedish people, but also for Europe and the climate... No, this is not good news. Mining is one of the most polluting human activities there is. In addition, all those machines used for digging and pulverizing the minerals, they run on petrol. In fact, the entire value chain from raw mineral to finished product, be it solar panels, wind turbine, or the lates…
Isn't rare earth metals mining insanely pollutive? I've heard they can be found all over the world but only China mines them massively because nobody else is willing to destroy their ecology.
One could argue that it's so cold in Sweden there isn't really an ecology there.