It’s electric. Technique could clean up mining of valuable rare earth elements | Hacker News Reader

It’s electric. Technique could clean up mining of valuable rare earth elements

science.org

60 pointstaubek38 comments

Rare earth elements are not absolutely necessary for clean energy applications. They're generally cited as necessary for electric motors and turbines, but there are equally efficient work-arounds:

https://eepower.com/news/eliminating-rare-earth-elements-in-...

> "Electric motors can also be made without using permanent magnets. An induction motor (also called a synchronous motor) operates on alternating current and uses electromagnetic fields produced by the stator (stationary) windings to induce a current in the rotor that produces an opposing magnetic field. By rotating the current around the stator windings, the rotor is induced to turn."

Once that's eliminated (i.e. eliminating the need for strong permanent magnets), rare earths are only used in quite specialized applications:

https://www.thoughtco.com/rare-earth-metals-2340169

Another potential substitute for permanent magnets is tetrataenite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrataenite

It was recently discovered that FeNi relaxes to this phase much more quickly in the presence of ~1% phosphorus.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36281692/

Also recently seen is the commercialization[1] of Fe16N2, which appears to have suitable characteristics as well.

[1] https://www.nironmagnetics.com/

335 vs 512 for neodymium-iron-boron.

Enough to be useful.

Induction motors tend to be quite a bit less efficient than permanent magnet motors though.

Another option is to use permanent magnet motors that just don't use rare earth magnets. The Netgain Hyper9 (fairly commonly used in EV conversions) for instance doesn't use rare earth elements according to EVWest [1]. It's bulky and not particularly powerful, but it has pretty good efficiency.

[1] https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=...

I believe some dual-motor EVs use a permanent magnet and an induction motor, the idea being that you can use just the permanent magnet motor most of the time for efficiency, but the induction motor is there for more power.

This is true but also useless. AC synchronous motors cannot be easily substituted for Permanent Magnet DC motors in all use cases. BLDC motors with permanent magnets are drastically more energy dense and are easier to control.

We've had AC Synchronous motors for a long time, but there is a reason that cordless drills have only been really good for a decade - BLDC motors. Likewise with drones, hoverboards, etc.

Idk for this technique, but generally speaking there is no such thing as green mining.

Greenhouse gasses are an existential threat to life as we know it on earth. Mining is not.

I hate what mining has done, but am heartened to see progress being made toward less dirty resource extraction.

I think 'existential' is a bit overused with respect to fossil fueled global warming. Full-scale nuclear war, or a major asteroid impact, would be existential. The rise in temperature and associated issues like extreme weather (droughts/floods/storms), sea level rise, the loss of permanent glaciers are serious issues but the timeline is slow enough (10 years per noticeable change) that adaptation is quite possible, to some extent.

Indeed adapatation is absolutely required, as we've tipped the system such that even if we halt fossil fuel use overnight, or (more plausible) over the next 50 years, permafrost melt, shallow ocean sediment warming, etc. will continue to leak ancient carbon into the atmosphere. We're heading back to climate conditions last seen in the Pliocene (3-5 million years ago), like it or not.

As far as mining, yes, it can be made cleaner but that just costs at least twice as much (because you have to spend as much on processing the waste and cleaning up the water as you do on developing the mine). The answer to that is tighter regulations, so that a dirty miner can't undersell a clean miner.

I think you're underestimating the impact that climate change will have, most importantly from human migration, food shortages, and war (which are secondary impacts of climate change, as opposed to the primary impacts you've listed). But I also think you've underestimated the primary impacts: you're assuming that the rate of change is stable, and it's absolutely not.

I'd note that the CO2 response, i.e. the amount of heat trapped as atmospheric CO2 rises, is neither exponential, nor linear, but rather logarithmic. That means the effect of going from 180->280 ppm - i.e. roughly an ice age minimum to maximum variation over the past two million years - is a probably greater than going from 280->420 ppm (the current industrial rise over the past ~200 years). So the rate of change is highly unlikely to suddenly spike.

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/

Of course, we should be working overtime to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix, but these claims that something is going to blow up overnight are just not scientifically supported - basically, statistically discernable changes are taking place on the scale of about 8-10 years if you look at the records. Meaning, climate in 2000 was clearly cooler than climate in 2010, but 2005-2010 is just noise.

That doesn't account for any hysteresis in the system. The weather extremes we are experiencing now are not due to emissions last year, but to emissions multiple decades ago

Regardless, comparing pre-industrial average with an ice age minimum and then saying "we probably haven't gotten quite so much warmer again" is ...not a comforting reframing of the situation.

The responses of the climate system are pretty well understood at this time, and nothing approaches 'existential', i.e. extinction-level - which I'd reserve for major asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, and total nuclear war. Equating fossil-fueled global warming to such events is simply scientific exaggeration. It's a notch down the logarithmic scale of doom from them, is all I'm saying.

What fossil-fueled global warming entails is more like a constant, steady grind with the grind getting noticeable worse over successive time periods (perhaps about a decade, maybe a little less). Conditions that span extreme weather are getting more frequent (mostly due to more water vapor in the atmosphere), record-breaking droughts in some regions are on the rise, 500-yr floods now take place every 5 years, etc.

Fundamentally, however, none of this is going away - it takes 100 years at least for global climate to equilibrate to current forcing, and again, there are some feedback effects dumping ancient stores of carbon slowly into the atmosphere.

Practically, this means as much energy and money are going to have to be spent on adapting to new conditions as on eliminating fossil fuels from the energy mix.

existential?

Just put a "green" and "electric" sticker on it and it becomes climate neutral, that's what we did with cars, it works

Except we can back up the effect electrification has on transportation. It's only 'just a label' if you're ideologically opposed. Yes, the labels can be overused, but if the discussion is only going to be about labels, why even bother? The underlying facts are pretty easy to work with.

> Except we can back up the effect electrification has on transportation.

Making an aberration 20% more efficient doesn't make it less of an aberration

The rebound effect kills all these efficiency claims anyways, you're decreasing the effect per unit not the overall effect

Distance travelled per driver peaked in the EU and US in the early 00s along with the sharp increase in oil prices back then and has been in steady decline ever since.

The only additional congestion you're seeing is due to increased urbanization.

> Distance travelled per driver peaked in the EU and US in the early 00s

Yet there are more cars than ever: https://www.statista.com/statistics/281134/number-of-vehicle...

Even if you were right you'd make my point, we use them less but have more of them, since ~50% of a car's environment impact is done before it even leaves the factory, you end up with a net negative

At the end of the day you're displacing 70kg of meat with 2+ tonnes of metal, electric or not it's an aberration

also: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

> Even if you were right you'd make my point, we use them less but have more of them, since ~50% of a car's environment impact is done before it even leaves the factory, you end up with a net negative

I'm pretty sure that's not true, unless you're using some definition of "environmental impact" that puts very little weight on the climate impact of CO2 emissions from burning petroleum.

I don't understand getting worked up about modes of transport, so allow me to just correct you on a few things:

> Yet there are more cars than ever:

Most of that growth is in China, where the car ownership rate is less than half of what it is in Europe, not to mention the US. Tends to happen when a country crosses a certain GDP-per-capita threshold.

It's actually closer to 15%. Here's a more detailed look:

https://www.greenncap.com/press-releases/lca-how-sustainable...

> also: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

I see this mentioned here and there, but so far air pollution measurements don't follow. Even the most congested of cities rarely exceed particulate emissions limits provided other sources are taken care of.

This quote is significant:

“Tyres are rapidly eclipsing the tailpipe as a major source of emissions from vehicles,” said Nick Molden, at Emissions Analytics, the leading independent emissions testing company that did the research. “Tailpipes are now so clean for pollutants that, if you were starting out afresh, you wouldn’t even bother regulating them.”

So the real story is not that car tyres are so dirty, but that tailpipes are so clean.

Well, it doesn't solve all the worlds problems, but generally if you can avoid nasty chemicals, it's a plus.

This specific advance just uses less of the nasty chemicals, so in car analogy terms its like an efficient hybrid, but that still seems like a good thing.

I assume all the people who hate anything that's not "perfect" are effectively concern trolling, even if its just coming from a genuine sense of dispair.

The first season of the How We Survive podcast is all about lithium mining in the western US and a fantastic overview of its history, importance, and ongoing efforts if you’re interested in resource extraction for the green economy more broadly.

Mining is basically necessary to do anything about climate change, and it’s so encouraging to see progress made on doing it more cleanly.

In the long term, the element that presents the biggest drive on mining will be phosphorus. It's needed for fertilizer and is not substitutable. It is present in the Earth's crust at an average abundance by mass of 0.1%. 100 million tonnes of phosphate fertilizer are applied every year.

The abundance by mass of REEs in the crust is about 20% that of phosphorus, so byproduct extraction of REEs during this asymptotic "mine average rocks" phase could be an order of magnitude above the rate of current consumption.

There are some… unorthodox… approaches in development for phosphorus extraction: https://phys.org/news/2019-12-technique-recover-phosphorus-u...

That used to be the main method.

England had piss-collectors who took wagonloads for processing.

One would hope in the long term we could figure out how to stop polluting waterways with it and depleting the soil and just use what can be cycled or concentrated by organisms whilst still getting adequate yields.

Sadly it will probably take a mass famine or three for that to happen.

Robot vision that allows you to precisely target individual plants and therefore allow mixed crops to be grown in the same field rather than rotate monocrops is an interesting current research area.

Generally also promises less "spray and pray" application and so less run off.

link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00989-3

too recent to be in sci-hub, anyone know how their case is going?

Endless resources lying around in space yet we keep digging here.

Rare earth elements are enriched by about a factor of 100 in the Earth's crust compared to chondritic abundances (undifferentiated asteroidal material.)

Like uranium, the best place to mine REEs in the solar system may be Earth.

Wondering why we don't just call them "lanthanides"...

Rare earth elements = lanthanides + yttrium, scandium.

It is probably better to make scandium and yttrium honorary lanthanides, in news reporting contexts, than to continue using the confusing "rare-earths" misnomer.

Obviously if we tried to rely on this only right now we'd all starve but i hope in 500 years people look back at the idea of removing a mountain or digging a pit into the earth and subsequently destroying the ecosystem of these places to recover the minerals within with the same kind of baffled outrage that we might have today for someone who casually pours used motor oil into a swimming pool.

Resources yes, but are there any proved reserves? (i.e. economically mineable)

And until it is economically feasible with space mining that will remain true.

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