311–320 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
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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.
Honestly, okay and? To understand context, Germany was like USA back then. A LOT of media, books, philisophy, goods came from there. German was read and spoken as a language like English is now. We did it so we would not get bombed, rolled and smoked. Sweden was dirt poor after the wars of 1600s. In the 1800s and early 1900s people emigrated to the USA as people where so poor and the government actually had to stop i…
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But he was Finnish
But a Swedish speaking Finn and it seems he made his discoveries while living in Sweden. From wikipedia: "Johan Gadolin was born in Åbo (Finnish name Turku), Finland (then a part of Sweden)." [0] "In 1779 Gadolin moved to Uppsala University." Uppsala is in Sweden. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Gadolin
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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.
It's more about China being strategic. They subsidies rare earth mining enough that very few others are able to compete and set up sustainable mining operations.
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.
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Others have pointed out what struck me as assholeish: perceived snarky tone, seems antagonistic for no reason, and completely unproductive. Like, why did they make that comment? I can't see any point other than criticizing and demeaning the other person for their statement (which also seems to be intentionally misinterpreted). Of course, there could be a language barrier (which I didn't think of immediately), in whic…
I actually find it quite interesting that people are jumping to the conclusion that the comment is demeaning . Ambiguous and lacking a particular effort to be explicitly positive, sure. But where is the "criticizing and demeaning" the author part? The comment is bare and terse, questioning whether it's really that impressive when you factor in geography or whether it's more or less to be expected. There is no ad homi…
Maybe most of us had worse experience with people than you, and have developed a more cynical model of human behaviour.
> But where is the "criticizing and demeaning" the author part?
This is just my quick analysis of what is probably more intuitive in my head than well fleshed out. I didn't think about this very hard, but I wanted to indulge you since you put effort into your comment of the situation.
It was written very tersely, it was disguised as a question, and it was directly aimed at the author of the comment, not the content of their comment. Also the way they clung onto a narrow definition of impressive seems like a petty attempt to reconstruct the narrative around the original comment's content to show how they're smart and the original poster isn't for "giving kudos" (ie being impressed) to a geographical area.
Like I said earlier though, maybe I read too much into it.
Also, I have higher standards for comment etiquette on HN than I would on other platforms. Why? I don't really know. Maybe that's a mistake too, clearly.
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Believe it or not, I discussed mining the moon with people, and they were horrified. Way more than mining Africa.
I just can't imagine mining the moon being in any way shape or form easier than mining the earth. The list of workplace hazards would be impressive. I imagine we're talking surface mines to keep the logistics manageable, but then: 1. How do you get astrominers there and back safely and on a regular basis whilst still keeping costs down? 2. What would it cost to keep your astrominers well fed and rested in a comfortab…
But I think mining asteroids will be easier than mining the moon. Because on asteroids, everything is right at the surface. There's an asteroid that seems to be just the nickel-iron core of a former planet. That's more nickel and iron than you could ever hope to mine on Earth, and there's no planet around it.
Mining the earth is of course the easiest, because we're already there and there's no space travel or vacuum involved. But it's also very destructive, and once you tackle the space travel and zero-g mining issues, I think asteroid mining is going to be way more profitable. As well as saving our planet.
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ferrocerium is the cheapest of the rare earths, but if we're talking about purified elements, cerium and yttrium are probably cheaper than neodymium the reason the purified elements are expensive is that they're so hard to separate from each other rare earth elements aren't actually rare they're called that because we've inherited alchemical terminology from the 18th century when alchemists were first starting to dis…
> Because of their geochemical properties, rare-earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated in rare-earth minerals. Consequently, economically exploitable ore deposits are sparse (i.e. "rare"). For the purposes of this conversation, which is about economics not geochemistry, they are in fact rare. At least the minerals are
Fun to see Kiruna here on Hacker News! My wife and I lived there for a year in 2014/2015. The mine is the _reason_ for the town, and it's exciting for my friends that live there to see additional minerals other than the high-quality iron ore they currently are mining. As some other comments have mentioned, the town is being moved as the mine follows the iron ore under the current town. It's a relatively small town (~…
> It's a relatively small town (~22,0000 people) Just so no-one gets the wrong idea: there was an additional 0 accidentally added there, the real number is ~22,000.
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ferrocerium is the cheapest of the rare earths, but if we're talking about purified elements, cerium and yttrium are probably cheaper than neodymium the reason the purified elements are expensive is that they're so hard to separate from each other rare earth elements aren't actually rare they're called that because we've inherited alchemical terminology from the 18th century when alchemists were first starting to dis…
> Because of their geochemical properties, rare-earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found concentrated in rare-earth minerals. Consequently, economically exploitable ore deposits are sparse (i.e. "rare"). For the purposes of this conversation, which is about economics not geochemistry, they are in fact rare. At least the minerals are
all this means is that there is a wide range of concentrations among ore deposits
it doesn't have anything to do with how high those prices are or how rare the minerals are, and as you pointed out upthread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34357834, the prices are pretty low
you said neodymium was US$400/kg; gold, the standard rare element, is US$60893/kg today