251–260 of 341 posts
wow this is great news, the Earth keeps surprising us with its riches!
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Yeah the Swedes helped Nazi Germany immensely selling them high quality iron. There were invasion plans drawn up going from German controlled Narvik to Kiruna, but the Swedes was so accommodating that it wasn't needed.
Also sold ball bearings for the Spitfire to the UK, and trained tens of thousands of Norwegian "police" in exile during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Gotta hedge your bets. (Or make the best of being between a rock and hard place.) Churchill famously quipped when Sweden started to build atomic shelters during the 1950s something along the lines of - "why? who are you going to fight"
> No rare earth elements are currently mined in Europe This is a little crazy fact I learnt today. Given how much we use, this news hits harder.
It is going to be an agonizing compromise for Sweden - destroy the Kiruna area with extraction (a million tons is a lot) or be environmentally friendly. Currently the Congo and Chile are being torn apart with toxic dollar a day child labor extraction. The Swedes will do a good job of mechanizing/sanitizing the process though. I went to Kiruna once to see the northern lights but they didn't show up.
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It often is as I understand it. But it's also helping reduce pollution through electrification so it's a balance. I (being not far from there) feel it's better to have polluting operations like this in heavily regulated and modern economies where there is a good chance the damage can be minimized at least.
It's important to understand that electrification does not reduce pollution.
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The graph you linked shows that this is not true. See the tiny purple graph at the right side of the bar? That's the rare earth minerals and their amount in an electric car is tiny.
That's not a particulary strong argument... The amount of magnesium in the human body is .1% by weight. That's not too far different from the amount of rare-earths in an EV. In the case of a human, i would not wish magnesium deficiency on them, it is not fun, can have severe long-term consequences (such as death), and generally is something that medical professionals will find concerning. In the case of an EV I don't…
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"Rare-earth" means lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. But scandium and yttrium are not used in magnets, so they would confuse people less by saying "lanthanide magnet" instead of "rare-earth magnet".
There's actually 17 rare earth minerals. The Wikipedia page for it helpfully lists out common uses for each of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
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The graph you linked shows that this is not true. See the tiny purple graph at the right side of the bar? That's the rare earth minerals and their amount in an electric car is tiny.
Isn't 0.5kg per vehicle a lot for rare earth minerals?? Sure it looks tiny compared to the amount of copper, nickel, manganese, etc used, but the whole point is that they're rare... 0.5kg of neodymium is around $200 and it's probably the cheapest of the rare earths 0.5kg of europium is around $3,750 Obviously lots of variation there, but maybe ratio of how much it costs vs the total cost of all the other minerals is…
They are not, in fact, rare, as is almost always pointed out when they are mentioned.
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I don't know anyone who refers to the element as wolfram in English. The abbreviations are internationally standardized and many don't stand for the English words anyway (Latin is quite common, e.g. Pb means plumbum, for lead).
I also don't know anyone who refers to it as wolfram, but wolfram is all over the tungsten wikipedia page.
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Depends on two things 1) what is being electrified - it’s not just about cars and 2) how the power is generated.
Also 3) the pollution created by unrecyclable end use electronic devices of all sizes.
Surely most electronic devices are recyclable as far as the metallic parts are concerned.