Hmm:

Kevin Williams, the managing director of Western Union Mines, which owns South Crofty, said: \”It is a very significant discovery because there is no other UK producer of indium. In fact, very few countries in the world do produce it in any big way.\” Western Union Mines originally hoped to find commercial quantities of zinc and applied for planning permission for modern processing facilities. It currently employs 60 workers and recently laid off 16 due to delays in securing investment. But it now hopes to employ up to 400 staff within two years.

John Webster, Western United Mines\’ chief operating officer, said: \”We found up to 1,000g of indium per tonne in some assays, but generally the average has been about 100g per tonne which is about one kilo every ten tonnes.

\”Each kilo is worth about £500 and we estimate we will mine between 250,000 to 400,000 tons per year in the first phase.\”

Note that they\’re saying they\’ll be mining 250,000 tonnes a year of ore, not of indium. They will be, at those numbers, getting perhaps 25 tonnes of indium. Which in a 600 tonne a year global market is pretty good actually.

Although to be honest with you, hard rock mining for something at 100 ppm concentrations doesn\’t sound all that sensible. Especially something like indium where the price (as with all minor metals) bounced around hugely. I\’ve seen it at over $1,000 a kg and at under $100 kg. The reason being that it\’s almost always extracted as a by product. If demand rises few will make more zinc (it\’s usually a by product of zinc mining) to get more indium, few will stop processing zinc if the price falls. So changes in demand don\’t really lead to large changes in supply, meaning that the price is very volatile.

Good luck to them by all means, but I wouldn\’t want to be basing my mining economics on being the swing provider of such a minor metal.

If they\’re going to produce zinc (and maybe tin) as well, that\’s a little different.

There\’s almost certainly Sc at 50 ppm in that ore as well….hmmmm…..

1. Erol Erça?,
2. Re?at Apak

So, what I want to know is, what will be the demand for gallium, germanium and indium if multi-junction solar cells become the industry standard?

I don\’t need accurate figures: to somewhere around an order of magnitude is just fine.

First question is why can\’t I work it out myself? Well, partly because my brain huuurts when I try to do such things but more exactly, because I have absolutely no idea how much of each metal by weight goes into such solar cells.

I can\’t see any information with a quick Google. It\’s certainly not the weight of the solar cell: we\’re only using thin films here. Further, I\’ve absolutely no idea, to even two orders of magnitude, what is the weight of a solar cell nor how many acres makes how many tonnes etc.

But what I\’d like to know is, imagine that the world rolls out, over the coming decades, GaAs, Ge and InP based solar cells, the multi-junction kind (as to why they would they can get over 40% efficiency which solves quite a lot of larger problems). Imagine further that this becomes the major renewable (in concept they\’re more efficient than wind etc).

So, how many tonnes per year are needed of Ga, Ge and In? (As and P are in bounteous supply, even if not as yet at the purities required).

I already know how much of each is currently produced: I want to see what the rise in production might have to be.

Anyone?

So I\’m doing a google search on some horrible technical stuff which I need to understand more about.

One of the first page  results was an article I\’d written essentially giving the broad brush picture and noting that I really need to bone up more on the details of this horrible technical stuff.

I won\’t put in here what I\’m actually searching for for I don\’t want this to turn up in the search results again…..

I see The Guardian has decided to declare war on the finances of Schloss Worstall.

In Britain, we have flooded the night with sodium orange: even away from towns lights shine out across the landscape and the sky, though it may be starless, is almost never the Bible-black of Dylan Thomas\’s imagination. How much we have lost – and how welcome the news that some councils are dimming their street lights to save money and energy, and in doing so reducing insidious pollution.

As regular readers will know those street lamps are powered by a sodium/scandium iodide cycle and the Worstall finances depend upon the sale of scandium into the lighting industry.

The reduction in light being advocated here is thus clearly a direct attack upon my finances.

Does this mean I\’m allowed to go destroy their offices as they\’ve, without an electoral mandate, decided to take away my living?

Or doe that justification only apply to students?

What with all this going on about Rolls Royce jet engines falling apart in mid air, was amused to be offered some ammonium perrhenate. This is the precursor to rhenium metal, which is then used as an alloying additive for the nickel turbine blades in such Rolls Royce engines.

Indeed, jet engines are the world\’s major use of the metal (about 70%).

Sadly, I had to tell the seller that he was about 2 years out of date on his prices. The new engines use about half of the rhenium that the old ones did as a result of new alloys being developed. We\’re thus down from the heady days of $10,000 a kg rhenium and in the doldrums of $2,000 a kg stuff.

And even at that price there\’d be a tough time trying to sell it.

There is, of course, no real connection between the two stories. Just found it interesting that both crossed my desk at the same time.

The G\’s got a Q&A about what it all means. Here\’s the real worry:

Aviation experts believe that as well as the engine losing its protective cowling, sections of turbine blade sheared off. A photograph taken by a passenger from inside the plane shows a small hole in the left wing, possibly caused by flying debris.

Good discussion here.

Turbine blades shearing off is really something that shouldn\’t happen. They\’re an extremely strong alloy (single crystal nickel rhenium alloys, jet engines being the major consumer of the metal rhenium….why, yes, I have occasionally provided ammonium perrhenate, the precursor material for rhenium metal, to the Rolls Royce supply chain) and they are, as you might expect in a jet engine, spinning at extremely high speed.

If they start to shear off while doing so they\’ll make one hell of a mess of the wing: which, as you may or may not know, is where the fuel tanks are. One or two maybe causes what we\’ve seen. But one going unbalances the engine, making more shearing off more likely of others, leading, possibly, to a catastrophic failure.

Yes, I too think that firing hot sharp metal through fuel tanks is probably not a good idea.

I\’m sure there will be a lot of people at Rolls Royce crossing fingers and hoping that this is an exceptional event, not some problem inherent in these rather new engines.

But now to the chicken gun! In order to test that a bird strike does not cause such a catastrophic failure, traditionally new jet engine designs have had a chicken fired at them from a cannon. The engine is spun up to full power (ie, take off levels) and then said chicken fired from said cannon right at it, straight into the spinning blades.

If it munches the chicken and carries on, all well and good. If it explodes in a shower of turbine blades, well, back to the drawing board you go.

British Rail, when designing the 125s, decided that there were sufficient cuttings etc, where there might be low flying birds, that they\’d better test the new trains with the chicken gun. So, it was flown over from the States (Lockheed owned it I think? Maybe Northrop?) and set up. They procured a chicken (no, of course not, already dead one, from the supermarket) and fired.

Straight through the armoured window, the steel back of the drivers\’ seat and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin.

This wasn\’t, to be polite about it, quite what the BR engineers were expecting. So, big report written up, detailing everything they had done, distance, gunpowder charge, tensile strength of window and so on, sent off to Lockheed (or Northrop?).

And back came the response:

Dear Sirs,

In order to use the \”chicken gun\” please note these operational steps.

1) First, defrost your chicken.

On this red mud in Hungary:

Soon after the spill, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences declared that the red sludge was nontoxic. The chief executive of MAL went on camera to say it was a completely harmless substance, that it could simply be washed away with water.

They were quickly proved wrong. The first responders suffered severe burns; apparently no one warned them that the sludge had a pH of 13, as caustic as lye.

It isn\’t \”as caustic as lye\”. It\’s caustic because it is lye!

Jeebus, was The Register the only outlet that bothered to ask someone who actually knows about this shit?

No, it\’s nothing at all to do with wider class issues, chinless wonders being appointed to see over the slaughter of stout working class boys.

\”Rescue complete as shift foreman is 33 rd to emerge\”

Some might call it bringing up the rear, others making sure that the boys are taken care of before oneself.

But that is what \”officer class\” means and as this story shows us, that elusive quality is to be found in mensch of every nationality, race and class.

In Hungary, anxiety is focused on another red sludge reservoir on the banks of the Danube at Almasfuzito, 50 miles north of Budapest. The waste here is similarly produced by turning bauxite into aluminium. Seven pools hold 12m tonnes of hazardous waste, including an estimated 120,000 tonnes of heavy metals.

Well, it depends on what you mean by \”heavy metals\” really. Iron is, arguably, a heavy metal, and there\’s something like 4 million tonnes of that in there.

But more importantly, whatever you are calling \”heavy metals\”, the point isn\’t how many tonnes there are there. It\’s what is the concentration? 1% heavy metals might sound like a high concentration but compared to what? What\’s the \”heavy metal\” content of normal soil? Depending upon how you define it, that concentration will be either more or less than the concentration claimed for this red mud.

There is a real problem with this stuff, which is that it is highly caustic….plus the fact that there\’s 12 million tonnes of this slurry. But the heavy metals content really isn\’t part of the problem.

Oh, and as to the idea that it\’s capitalism that rapes Gaia:

Many of the threats to the river\’s health are part of the legacy of communism.

Quite.

Peeps don\’t seem to be able to understand the logic of what they themselves are saying.

Experts have warned a new flood could be even more toxic, because much of what poured out in the original leak was water, leaving the remaining sludge more concentrated.

Let us remind ourselves of what this \”toxic sludge\” actually is. It\’s red mud, a mixture of iron oxides, alumina, silicates, titanium oxides (and a large number of silicates of all of those) plus water and caustic soda.

The heavy metals and radioactives contents are around and about what you find in soils all over the place. Indeed, red mud is sometimes used to spread on land that is too acidic: the caustic soda aids in making the soil more alkaline.

We\’ve got two dangers here, two problems.

The first and most obvious is the caustic soda. Horrible stuff, will kill through chemical burns and the only real solution is, umm, to put it into solution. To dilute it in fact. Which is why the Danube is back to normal after last week\’s leak. Big river the Danube (just as an example, one such aluminium plant dumps its fresh red mud straight into the Gulf of Corinth. Sufficient water there that it goes from being a horrible toxic mess to a suspension of dirt in the water and then silt: problem solved.).

The second is the sheer volume of the stuff and the way in which a wave of it will indeed drown/crush what is in its path.

So, if most of the water has run off (taking, as you can imagine, a goodly protion of the caustic soda with it), what\’s left? Yup, a rather more solid than before pile of those oxides and silicates. That\’s the \”more concentrated\” bit. And what do we know about \”more concentrated\” suspensions of dirt?

Yes, that\’s right, if they do escape then they don\’t go that far. Because they\’re more concentrated, more like a pile of dirt than a free flowing liquid. This is why you can have a pile of mud but not a pile of water.

Yes, of course there are still dangers: but not nearly the dangers that we seem to be getting from the more excitable of the environmentalists. As I\’ve pointed out elsewhere. This is indeed a disaster, not least for those who have lost their lives and homes. But it\’s a short-term disaster, not a long term one. One good rainy winter and the land and the rivers will be clear of what has spilled so far.

As I\’ve also pointed out elsewhere we\’ve been working for a couple of years on a way of actually treating this red mud so that instead of it being a waste, it becomes a resource to be mined. Our funding application went in four months ago, decision time around the end of the year.

No, I haven\’t been to Hungary in two decades…..nor do I know how to drive a bulldozer.

Tin is at a record high, reaching $26,780 a tonne on Friday –

Hadn\’t realised it had bounced that far.

Cornwall\’s tin mines are profitable again…..In fact, there might even be profit in nipping out with a wheelbarrow and building a little bloom furnace up on the moors.

Well, actually, it\’s called \”red mud\”.

At least one person was killed after the dam of a sludge reservoir at a big alumina factory in western Hungary burst, flooding parts of two villages. Three people were missing and 10 were taken to hospital, two of them with serious injuries. Ambulance workers said they treated 60 people, as many as 10 of whom had serious injuries, and also confirmed one had died.

And it\’s horrible stuff too. The problem isn\’t that it\’s \”sludge\” or mud, it\’s that it\’s a mixture of mining wastes (roughly equivalent in composure to \”dirt\” to use the technical phrase, a mixture of iron oxide, alumina and various silicates) and caustic soda.

Fresh out of the plant it has a ph of 13 or so. Sufficiently caustic or alkaline to cause serious damage to anything that might fall into it.

And there\’s millions upon millions of tonnes of this produced each year around the world. Current treatment is to let it sit in these lagoons for a decade or two until it weathers, then stick earth on top and plant it.

Our current project in the day job is to change this. To devise a system whereby those bits which are valuable are taken out and valued, leaving behind an inert waste: essentially the silicates, or as they\’re more commonly known, sand.

In fact, we\’ve devised such a system and technically it works. What we\’re not sure about is whether it works economically: we\’re waiting for the funding to run a pilot plant to check that out. The basic idea has been around for decades, we\’re just adding something from our knowledge store to what everyone else already knows and it might just be that which tips it over into financial sensibleness.

I wouldn\’t say that this is an example of a right wing blogger having created something, no, for nothing has as yet been created. But we are at least attempting to turn ourselves into the world\’s largest recycling company (by tonnage that is).

There really are things which we would very much rather do in large organised factories rather than having some William Morris Arts and Crafts movement trying to do them.

An unprecedented outbreak of lead poisoning linked to a gold rush has killed at least 200 children in northern Nigeria this year, with a further 18,000 people affected.

Announcing the figures, the UN said it had sent an emergency team to assess the full impact of the \”acute massive lead poisoning\” in Zamfara state, where seven villages have so far been confirmed as contaminated. In all cases, villagers had been grinding ore by hand to search for gold when they unwittingly freed lead particles also contained in the rock.

Processing that sort of lead heavy ore isn\’t difficult. You end up with both gold and lead to make batteries from. But it does require capital, industrial amounts of it, and a whacking great big factory.

It just isn\’t true that small is always beautiful.

Yes, I thought I\’d see this name here.

So this fuss over conflict materials has finally hit The Telegraph.

As one would expect, after it\’s been filtered through the vaious NGOs, press releases and other wibbles, not a great deal of the accuracy is left.

Most mobile phone parts are made in Asia by American or European companies, but the minerals that go into the electronics, including tin, tantalum and tungsten, are sourced from all over the world.

OK, that part is true.

One of these regions is the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, whose remote reaches are notorious for violence and human rights abuses. Its tin is used to solder electronics; tungsten goes into filaments and the component that helps mobile phones to vibrate; and tantalum holds electrical charge.

Global Witness, the international conflict observer, reports that rebels, militias and army units have hijacked the trade in mineral ores from the eastern Congo. The civilian population has been subject to massacres, forced labour and recruitment of child soldiers.

That\’s also true, but what we really want to know is to what extent is that true?

And it also points out that large international companies are complicit in the trade by buying the minerals, usually after they have been sent through smelters in Malaysia and Rwanda.

Err, no, that\’s not true. Or rather, it is of tin, but it certainly ain\’t of tantalum. There are no tantalum refiners in either Rwanda or Malaysia.

Companies from Hewlett-Packard to Intel will now be required to trace exactly where they got their minerals from and publish a detailed explanation if they are trading with suspect areas in the eastern Congo region.

It has provoked some consternation from the industry group, the Information Technology Industry Council.

The business group argues that while the aims are laudable, it would be complex to carry out. Wired magazine reports that Steve Jobs, the chief executives of Apple, shares this concern about the difficulty of tracing Congolese minerals.

In response to a concerned customer asking whether Apple, the technology company, has tried to stamp out use of the minerals in the iPhone, Jobs replies: “Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials.

“But honestly, there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.”

And it is indeed a very complex problem. Although the tantalum part is the easiest to deal with. For processing Ta out of coltan is a right bugger. So much so that there\’s only a few companies around that can do it. A couple in Brazil, one in the US (yes, one), one in Germany, a couple in China, one in Kazakhstan…..you can see that if you wanted to control the Ta trade that\’s where you\’d do it. And the western companies there already refuse to purchase Congo columbo tantalite: and yes, the work has been done to tell where the mineral came from has been done and we can tell the source by looking at the residual elements in the ore.

However, once it\’s been made into Ta metal (we actually use the powdered metal to make the capacitors for the phones) you cannot tell where it has come from. So, if you were trying to check on the entire supply chain you\’ve got to get the Chinese and Kazakh producers signed up: and while I\’ve no doubt they will sign up the value of the paper upon which they do so, well, umm, your used loo roll has greater value.

The Nb, because it\’s processed at the same factories, has the same problems.

The gold and tin however, they\’re impossible to control for a different technological reason.

Getting them out of their ores is really rather simple: if you\’ve a bit of labour to make charcoal, a forest to make charcoal from and the knowledge of a bloom furnace then you can get the metal out of the ores. Tin making is, by definition, a Bronze Age technology. Once you\’ve got the metal, either Sn or Au, it can be fed into hte secondary market (ie, the scrap market) with no problems at all. Once there it cannot, under any circumstances at all, be traced.

Tungsten I know little about so sorry.

So the restrictions won\’t really work I don\’t think. And of course they won\’t really work anyway because of something else very important indeed:

Congo is not a major global producer of “The 3 Ts and Gold” that Enough has focused on. According to the USGS, Congo produces approximately 0.6% of the world’s tungsten, 3.8% of the world’s tin, 0.1% of the world’s niobium (columbium), 8.6% of the world’s tantalum, and 0.4% of the world’s gold. Thus, it is easy for the producers of electronics destined for the USA to obtain their “conflict minerals” from other sources. The conflict minerals will continue to flow out Congo at the same rate as they always have, only their destination may change, e.g. to China or India.

That last sentence: yes, minerals are fungible, just like money and oil are. Stop people, even if you\’re successful, in using said metals in electronics and they\’ll just make electronics from non-conflict sources and use the conflict minerals to make the other things that are made from said metals.

If some 4% of the world\’s tin cannot be used to make electronics then that 4% will be used to make ships\’ propellors, or \”no-spark\” tools for oil rigs, or coal scuttles. The tantalum will go into super-alloys, the gold into bridgework for the ageing population (yes, dentistry is still a major industrial user of gold).

So, here, from within the belly of the beast that is the world\’s trade in minor metals, is what I think the real effect of this recent addition to the law over conflict minerals will be.

The whole thing has been ginned up by the Enough Project. Part and parcel of what will now happen is that there will be auditing teams set up to try and trace where minerals come from (despite the above problems). Those auditing teams will, I would bet very good sums of money, be made up of those that the Enough Project approves of: and you don\’t have to be as cynical as I am to think that those they approve of will be those who are members of the Enough Project.

Yes, quite: the major effect will be a nice little earner for the friends and relatives of those who got the law passed.

They\’re already talking about only 1 cent on a phone giving a budget of $10 million a year. Quite a few buddies and lovers get to fly around the world being important for that sort of sum.

In short: it won\’t do anything because minerals are fungible, electronics will cost more and some right on policy wonks from DC get nice new jobs at our expense.

What was it Bismark said about sausage factories?

We all know that as manuscripts were copied over and over again down the centuries that errors crept in. This didn\’t go away with printing….there\’s one Bible that was printed declaring \”Thou shalt commit adultery\”.

Unfortunately it still happens:

To read a newspaper article on something you know about and to finish it going, yes, he\’s got a decent grip on the subject there.

It\’s Ambrose E_P on the subject of China and rare earths. Yes, they supply 97% of the world, yes, they\’re restricting export and yes everyone\’s getting worried about it. Which is why all sorts of companies are looking for new sources. Perhaps new mines or perhaps extracting them from something which is already mined.

We\’re doing the latter and might have something interesting to say about that in a year or so.

However, if anyone wants to come and play in this sand pit in the hopes of making money I\’d advise a note of caution. There are plenty of known places where you can get mixed rare earths: ore really isn\’t the thing that\’s in short supply. It\’s being able to separate them which is the real lock that China has on the market.

And that, I think, is where someone could at least attempt to make some serious money. Designing a new method of separation. The current technology uses hundreds and, for some of them, thousands, of iterations of dissolving in acid and recrystalising. Something which either side=stepped or reduced this process would be very welcome indeed.

There are a couple of interesting ideas about how to do this out there in the ether and if anyone has a few hundred thousand they\’d like to throw at some basic research then, well, my email\’s here on the blog if you want to get in contact……

SS chief Heinrich Himmler set up a secret unit in the Dachau concentration camp after becoming convinced he could turn sand into gold, a book has claimed.

Yes, of course it was a scam: but the fun thing is that it is actually possible.

As Sir Pterry pointed out, you can turn lead into gold by using the lead as printing type and then selling the resultant newspapers. To turn sand into gold all you have to do is invent the silicon chip.

Simples.