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

Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

news.cision.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 341 posts

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#171

Post by FpUser »

throwayyy479087 wrote: post #165
FpUser wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"They will be made to allow it." I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.

I've wondered how that works - I'm sure Biden isn't calling Erdogan and saying that directly, right? How does the "you will fall into line, we are the hegemon" message get conveyed in 2022? I don't think Erdogan is even that opposed, I think he wants to be seen as a player.

>"I've wondered how that works"

Nice country you've got here. Will be a real shame if anything happens to it.

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#172

Post by anthonypasq »

barbegal wrote: post #163
fragmede wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Kiruna mine is the largest and most modern underground iron ore mine in the world. The mine is located in Kiruna in Norrbotten County, Lapland, Sweden Sweden's possibly the country most serious about the environment, but money talks.

There are larger open-pit iron ore mines in Australia. This mine produces around 1% of global output.

1 mine producing 1% of global output seems insane no?

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

papito wrote: post #128
dsign wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gasp! We must preserve the asteroids, none of that human destructiveness over there! /s

Humans will always $hit where they eat, so I say, go full hog on the Universe. We are less than a rounding error in time and space in terms of the damage we can do to it. It's like peeing in the ocean. The Earth is unique and precious, but the vast out there - we cannot do our worst even if we tried.

> Humans will always $hit where they eat

So does every other living thing, in fact. It's not like every animal and plant is a nature conservationist and humans are the mindless exploiters - it's actually the other way around. We talk about restraining ourselves because, unlike the rest of the nature, we can choose to be selfless, or at least thing longer-term and at ecosystem scale.

Also, you're absolutely correct. Earth is a gem. Everything else in space we know of is just rocks and deserts and clumps of gases. And there's so much of it that we aren't going to make a dent even if we rode the exponential growth for a while longer.

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#175

Post by mcv »

papito wrote: post #128
dsign wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gasp! We must preserve the asteroids, none of that human destructiveness over there! /s

Humans will always $hit where they eat, so I say, go full hog on the Universe. We are less than a rounding error in time and space in terms of the damage we can do to it. It's like peeing in the ocean. The Earth is unique and precious, but the vast out there - we cannot do our worst even if we tried.

In the past I've also wondered if it wouldn't be too destructive to mine asteroids, but it makes no sense to worry about that while we continue to destroy our planet. This is the only place we can live, with vibrant, complex, diverse ecosystems, and we're causing a massive extinction event here, while making this one habitable planet less habitable for ourselves.

Meanwhile asteroids are completely uninhabited and dead, and there's millions of them. They have all the same minerals the Earth has, and often much closer to the surface. We could even just mine a few and easily replace all the destructive mining on Earth.

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#177

Post by daneel_w »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

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.

It certainly depends on the industrial process as a whole. But it's worth pointing out that nobody ever had a complaint about gold, silver, platinum or diamond mining, nor about the unimaginable volumes of ore processed to acquire iron and copper. But somehow these days everyone likes to think that they know that rare earth metals are "the devil".

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#179

Post by ciconia »

bjornsing wrote: post #88
ciconia wrote: post #69

> "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…

But isn’t this a feature of every technological improvement? You need fossil fuel energy to be able to extract renewable energy, yes, but there’s no reason to believe you couldn’t replace it with renewable energy down the line. It’s sort of like how you bootstrap a compiler: the first version of a new language tool chain needs to be implemented in some other language. But then you can make it “self-hosted” by impleme…

> yes, but there’s no reason to believe you couldn’t replace it with renewable energy down the line.

Is there any chance of this happening by, say, 2050? I don't think so. The whole "energy transition" idea is a fallacy. Today we burn more coal, petrol and gas than ever before. We simply don't know how to manufacture solar panels and wine turbines without fossil fuels.

Re: Europe's largest deposit of rare earth metals discovered in Sweden

#180

Post by anononaut »

daneel_w wrote: post #177
qwerty456127 wrote: post #62

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.

It certainly depends on the industrial process as a whole. But it's worth pointing out that nobody ever had a complaint about gold, silver, platinum or diamond mining, nor about the unimaginable volumes of ore processed to acquire iron and copper. But somehow these days everyone likes to think that they know that rare earth metals are "the devil".

Gold, silver, and platinum are largely by products of zinc mining etc in recent decades.
Post reply on HN