321–330 of 341 posts
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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
Reminds me of Tesla. Was he Serb or Croatian
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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…
Robots. Astromining will be done by robots. 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…
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Robots. Astromining will be done by robots. 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…
I can imagine dragging smaller asteroids and letting them "drop" into earth (e.g. attach massive parachutes and then guide them to land on some mining site. Totally sci-fi but I still find it less so than the moon. The reason I don't imagine robots mining the moon is that minerals, as you say, are not readily on the surface, nor is the moon mainly made up of a specific mineral.
But the advantage of asteroids is that everything is at the surface.
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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> "point is that they're rare..." They are not, in fact, rare, as is almost always pointed out when they are mentioned.
> 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"). Regardless, they never show up in a pure form in nature so what we should really be looking at is how common minerals that they're easy to extract from are not how common the atom itself is. And the…
Diamond, almost pure carbon, is the only that comes to mind.
So, it is meaningless to single out lanthanides for this. What does distinguish them, instead, is that they are expensive to separate from one another. In certain places such as Yterby and the site mentioned in the original article, ore contains a concentrated mix of many lanthanide compounds. It remains a chore to get the praseodymium and the neodymium into separate ingots.
The article said biggest in Europe and also that currently Europe was at 0. How big an impact is expected/hoped for from this mine
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The Hybrit pilot plant is already operational and producing steel, although in small quantities. That sounds like a proven result to me, do you disagree? Can you summarize what the linked article (unfortunately paywalled and in swedish) says? I am quite interested in this project.
It is unproven that it can be done profitably at scale.