[HN Gopher] Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves
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Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves
Author : ksec
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-07-05 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.metal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.metal.com)
| exabrial wrote:
| Turkey is in EU/NATO, but I question the relationship given
| Erdogan. My naive assessment is he is now "elected" for life by
| force. No idea if my perception is correct, but given their
| strategic geographical importance and this as well, It'd be a
| damn shame if democracy there disappeared.
| baybal2 wrote:
| aiilns wrote:
| Turkey is in NATO, not in the EU. I believe elections are to
| happen next year, although democracy in Turkey is probably not
| going to get better for it.
| mda wrote:
| Why not?
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| nurettin wrote:
| I wonder if today's metal future prices crashed for this reason.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| no
| anonu wrote:
| Strange article. Economy in the dump. 75% inflation rate
| rendering everyone's money useless. Great time to "discover" a
| massive stockpile of hard assets.
| muzani wrote:
| "drilling work started in 2011"
| greggsy wrote:
| Take any 'motherlode discovery' announcements with a grain of
| salt - whether it's gold, rare earth or diamonds.
|
| They're almost certainly exaggerated, and are often announced
| to satisfy investors with a healthy - temporary - uptick in
| stock price.
| exabrial wrote:
| Looking at some of the concentrations for neodymium and
| praseodymium... why _isn't_ magnet recycling more of thing?
| Certainly extracting those elements from waste is cheaper than
| raw ore.
| Victerius wrote:
| I have a bunch of old (5-15 yrs old) HDD hard drives in a
| closet. Would that help? I don't know what to do with them.
| cronix wrote:
| I took mine out and use them as refrigerator magnets. They
| are awesomely strong. No more cheap magnets sliding down the
| refrigerator not holding weight.
|
| Edit: Daughter really liked using the shiny platters in art
| projects (after degaussing with the RE magnets). I've reused
| some of the dc motors in other projects (arduino type stuff).
| All that's left is the small circuit board, read/write head
| and metal body to recycle.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have a couple too, but I broke one by letting it leave my
| hand too far from the surface.
| rlpb wrote:
| We've put away all our awesomely strong fridge magnets
| while we bring up a child. It's not worth the risk of him
| swallowing them. I don't trust small magnets to stay inside
| larger plastic frames, either.
| hinkley wrote:
| How do you collect enough rare earth magnets to be worth
| recycling them? I don't mean where do you find that many
| magnets, I mean how do you store, transport and then process
| them. You'd have to demagnetize them first, right?
|
| It doesn't seem like the temperature requirements are outside
| of something one could do with pretty low end hardware, but the
| problem is that a lot of the equipment you might have to say do
| this in your garage would be ferrous, which is problematic.
| Maybe a recycling center wouldn't have that problem?
| [deleted]
| yread wrote:
| million mt? Is that million megatons? And which rare earth
| elements are they?
| rajandatta wrote:
| Wouldn't it be 694 million metric tonnes? I million megatons is
| a hell of a lot.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| 1 million megatons is ~ 46.55 metric tons
|
| A megaton is 4.184 * 10^15 J, which is equivalent to 46.55
| grams
| [deleted]
| moralestapia wrote:
| LOL, 46 tons would hardly ever be news, that's about the
| output of a medium-sized mine _per minute_.
| ptk wrote:
| That's astonishing. I clearly don't have any type of
| intuition for the amount of earth these mines are
| extracting, because the number you're putting out there
| seems comical.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Indeed. Check this ->
| https://www.grida.no/resources/11419
|
| The volumes involved are huge!
| gpcr1949 wrote:
| You can't convert mass to energy like that in this context.
| A megaton just means a million tons (of TNT in an energy
| context). You can say: (the energy released when
| detonating) a megaton of TNT is equivalent to 46.55 g of
| pure mass to energy conversion (E = mc**2 type), but that
| would be irrelevant in this context because no one is
| planning converting this mass to energy, nor would it be
| possible.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| tasuki wrote:
| Probably metric tonnes, but it's weird to use "Mt" to mean
| metric tonne rather than megatonne. The symbol for metric
| tonne is "t" [0]. It would certainly be less ambiguous to
| just spell it out.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
| [deleted]
| philipkglass wrote:
| See pages 14 and 15 of this presentation:
| https://mric.jogmec.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/seminar...
|
| It's mostly light rare earth elements. Over half of it is
| cerium and most of the rest is lanthanum. Most of the economic
| value is in the elements that are _not_ cerium or lanthanum. It
| appears to have about the same proportion of neodymium and
| praseodymium (valuable light rare earth elements used in
| magnets) as the Mountain Pass, California mine, plus more
| terbium (more expensive heavy rare earth element also useful in
| magnets) than Mountain Pass.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Also on that slide: "has average 3.14% grade". I assume that
| doesn't mean the rock consists of 3.14% of the target
| element, but is 3.14% of whatever ore they're targeting,
| right?
| loufe wrote:
| You're right, there's no way they would not tout the "15%
| grade" of the actual ore, if by some miracle there was
| 3.14% grade the entirety of their staked land.
|
| Ore is by definition the "economically
| feasible/interesting" subsection of the rock covered by the
| claim.
| yread wrote:
| Awesome, thanks this clears it up. And are these reserves
| measured, inferred or indicated? Is there a PFS?
| jwilk wrote:
| No no no, mt = millitonne = kg.
| dificilis wrote:
| It reminds me of a recent HN story telling us not to trust any
| number you see in a news story.
| Barrera wrote:
| The article is vague about the identities of the elements. They
| tend to occur together, but some are way more valuable than
| others. Cerium, for example, is considered a "rare earth" but is
| not that rare at all:
|
| > Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up
| 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of
| copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common
| metals such as lead (13 ppm) and tin (2.1 ppm). Thus, despite its
| position as one of the so-called rare-earth metals, cerium is
| actually not rare at all. ...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerium
| divbzero wrote:
| A sibling comment [1] cited additional details that the find is
| indeed mostly cerium, followed by lanthanum which also has
| limited economic value.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993668
| vanattab wrote:
| Honest question. What is the distribution throughout the crust
| though? If something that is 66 ppm but near uniformily
| distributed could be much harder to extract then something that
| is 2.2 ppm but occurs I distinct viens.
| oportunityastro wrote:
| It is nothing to do with anything. Copper is relatively
| abundant by this measure, but almost everyone who I know who
| has a view on copper see the future supply situation as
| terrible. There is politics, financial cycles, actual site
| economics...I mean the US right now is the perfect example of
| this, centuries of discovered natural gas reserves that is
| proven economic to take out of the ground, and natural gas is
| skyrocketing...it isn't that simple.
| philipkglass wrote:
| That's exactly what makes most of the rare earth elements
| "rare": they are common in the Earth's crust but rarely
| concentrated into easily mined deposits. Neodymium and
| praseodymium are also more common than tin but significantly
| more costly because they don't form ore bodies like tin does
| under geochemical influences.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth.
| ..
| [deleted]
| hrkucuk wrote:
| God damn. If nothing this will be used to make ppl force vote for
| Erdogan in 2023... Just another propoganda tool to vote him :(
| And I was naively keeping up my hopes for this Turkey's 100th
| birthday elections, but it seems like he will follow a Nazarbayev
| model for himself. I can only hope him to get pulled into his
| bubble where he leaves important decisions to liable, honest
| people. But unless his "magistrates" come down it does not seem
| possible.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I don't quite see how Erdogan would be any better at exploiting
| that resource than anybody else. Worse actually, because he'll
| have trouble attracting foreign investments...
| asciimike wrote:
| In case you're coming to this thread asking yourself why there
| are a bunch of comments like this, I really like
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-su...
| as an overview of "how we got here in the first place."
| arcticbull wrote:
| Despite their name, rare earth elements aren't rare at all - in
| fact, they're all over the place. They're in the US, Canada,
| Brazil, Australia, Vietnam, China, India, Russia - and of course
| Turkey. [1]
|
| Most of the refining takes place in China, though, because only
| China is willing to pay the toxic environmental cost associated
| with actually doing so. This is what that process looks like. [2]
|
| It's good to diversify the supply to be sure, but the question
| is, will Turkey be willing to pay the environmental cost of
| refining? Or will China continue to take that on. We're not short
| of input ore, so if not, I suspect the market will continue to
| look much like it does in spite of this discovery.
|
| [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rare-earth-elements-
| where-i...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-
| place-...
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Making them a little less rare.
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(page generated 2022-07-05 23:00 UTC)