Not when all the other ones are killed in the crib before they can even learn to stand.
I suppose it’s possible. But then we will be buying rare earth stuff from China/etc forever. Because this company, run the government way, will probably only produce very little of the stuff, and it’ll probably be substandard, and nobody in industry would really use it effectively. Oh and it’ll be ridiculously expensive.
Well if the Postal Service, which has been around since 1775 is any indication, I would say you would lose that bet.
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Currently the only U.S. rare earths mine is at Mountain Pass in California. Analysis by U.S. national laboratories show the Brook Mine coal contains valuable quantities of the rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, as well as the critical minerals gallium, scandium and germanium…
“We would intend to mine it here in Wyoming, process it here in Wyoming and sell it to domestic customers including the government,” Ramaco CEO Randall Atkins said Thursday…
A public company with metallurgical coal mines in Appalachia, Ramaco in recent years received Department of Energy grants to develop coal into carbon-based products such as carbon fiber. This year, it got a $6.1 million grant from Wyoming to build a rare earth and critical minerals processing plant.
DB2
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That is how you do it so we get more competition.
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We have a company in Missouri that plans to extract rare earths from lead mine tailings. Have not heard much from them in a while.
You wonder if all those coal ash cinders people worry about might contain recoverable rare earths. I think you expect them to be mostly iron and silicates but people worry about toxics leaching out.
It would be wonderful if those waste streams proved to be valuable raw materials.
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When they mined the Comstock for gold they found that it was silver that was clogging their tools while they dug.
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And the tailings from the Mesabi iron range were mined a time or two as technology changed.
DB2
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What bet? And what does the postal service have to do with refining, purifying, and delivering quality rare earth materials to manufacturers of stuff that need them?
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Oh I thought you said “Because this company, run the government way, will probably only produce very little of the stuff, and it’ll probably be substandard, and nobody in industry would really use it effectively. Oh and it’ll be ridiculously expensive.” My mistake.
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I think it’s mostly when privately held companies have the government as their major customer. I have commented before, how the defense contractors I have had stock in, over the years, always have a BoD packed with retired Generals, Admirals, and DoD civilians. Boeing got so it ran it’s commercial side the way it runs it’s defense side, and lost half it’s commercial market share.
Boeing went so far off the acceptable level of corruption that there was actually a prosecution. This nitwit, working for DoD, “negotiated” a contract for tankers for the Air Force, that was scandalously abusive to the Air Force, and wonderfully beneficial to Boeing. Boeing then rewarded her with a cush job.
Steve
Explain Lehman brothers, Washington Mutual, General Motors who was saved by the Government and then released to do it again, Enron, Worldcom…I could go on.
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Most of those companies went out of business. In GM’s case, they brought in a new CEO, and Mary seems to be doing fairly well.
With defense contractors, not only corruption, but epic levels of sloth are the norm, and tolerated, by the government officials who want a cush seat on the BoD.
Steve
Still Bright has developed a new way to extract copper, one that it says can recover nearly all the copper from typical ores without pre-processing steps that lose up to 20% of the metal. It’s effective enough that it could even be used on tailings, the discard piles which still contain smaller amounts of the metal that mines leave behind…
Still Bright soaks copper-containing ores in a vanadium-based solution, which draws the metal out of the ore. When the vanadium solution is spent, the company’s system uses electricity to regenerate it.
DB2
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I keep wishing the government would allow/mandate nuke fuel reprocessing, like most other countries do. Seems we have a vast amount of fuel, just laying around in dry casks and storage pools.
Steve
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There is a lot of fear about nuclear. Part of it is just lack of understanding, and part of it is fear that entities (companies, or whatever) will compromise safety for profits. And then there’s misinformation.
Plus, the nuclear waste that has to be dealt with eventually. Even in geologically stable areas where nothing else is going on, the state(s) don’t want to accept the waste.
I am pro-nuclear. But I also understand the issues surrounding it, and they aren’t trivial. We can point to France as a nation that did it properly. So why can’t we?
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USian companies have not covered themselves with glory, when it comes to running nukes. I have mentioned the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo before. The power company had been notified their reactor needed to be inspected for leaks…they knew they had a leak, as they were losing Boric acid. But they didn’t want to take the plant off line for inspection/repair, because that would hurt profits. They nearly had a containment breech. This was First Energy, the same luminaries whose lack of right of way maintenance caused the northeast blackout some 20 years ago.
My first thought is to turn all the nukes over to the Navy. If a Navy serviceman blows off his job, there are consequences: a few years in the brig, and bad paper. That may contribute to the higher standard of reactor operations in the fleet. But no. Ideology dictates everything be “privatized” and run to maximize profit.
Steve
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Actually, I was thinking government generally. But your idea is fantastic. The Navy produces some of the best nuclear power people on the planet. They are extremely rigorous and disciplined, and I don’t believe they have ever had a major incident. In fact, I can’t even think of a minor one.
Give it to the Navy. It will be done right.
They should also adopt a standard reactor design. In France, that’s what they did. In the USA, no two reactors are the same. So there are a lot of up-front design costs. But that’s a tangent to your point.
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Well, there are theories, but I don’t know as they have ever, definitively, determined what happened to Thresher and Scorpion, as the wrecks are too deep to take a look-see. iirc, they have been monitoring Scorpion’s wreck for signs of a radiation leak, but have not found any, supposedly.
Steve
I’m familiar with the Thresher incident. While we can’t know absolutely for certain (no black box for subs), they believe the valves controlling the ballast tanks froze shut, so they couldn’t blow ballast. This was due to condensation, and the temperature at that depth. They were able to reproduce this on a sister sub in dock.
The reason for the need to blow ballast tanks is less clear, but they strongly suspect flooding when silver-brazed joints failed.
None of this was the nuclear plant failing.
Scorpion I’m less familiar with. I’m not aware that they suspect a failure of the nuclear system there.
Perhaps I should have been more specific, and said “no major nuclear incident”, or minor one.
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