
The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust - pierre-renaux
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth?p=1
======
Animats
The Mountain Pass, California rare earth mine, once the largest source of rare
earths in the world, was shut down in 2002. After a series of toxic spills,
and price competition from China, it wasn't economic to operate any more.

Now it's back on line, after a huge rebuild.[1] It wasn't easy to satisfy
California environmental controls, but they did it. Even the Sierra Club is
reasonably satisfied.[2] Rather than tailings ponds, they have a large back-
end processing operation which gets the water out of the tailings. They can
then reuse the water (a big deal during the drought), and they get a solid
waste material out, which is essentially what was in the ground to begin with,
minus the good stuff.

A few years ago, China tried cranking up the export price of rare earths, and
refused to export them to Japan at all. So users of rare earths came up with
alternatives, and production restarted in the US, Australia, and Canada. Rare
earths aren't all that rare worldwide, it turns out. With demand down and
production up, the price tanked.

Molycorp, which owns the US mine, is having terrible financing problems, but
the mine and all the associated gear are up and running, producing about 4,000
metric tons a year of rare earth materials. Rare earth supply is now mostly a
solved problem. China's mining operation remains a mess, but that's not
inherent in rare earth mining any more.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id8hDUT5nHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id8hDUT5nHQ)
[2] [http://www.desertreport.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/DR_Sp...](http://www.desertreport.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/DR_Spring2011.pdf)

~~~
Someone
_" Rare earths aren't all that rare worldwide"_

They are called rare because, (almost) whatever hand of earth or rock you
grab, they are rare within that hand.

some of them aren't rare in the "there isn't much of it" sense at all. For
example,
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element)
claims Cerium is the 25th most abundant element in the Earth's crust.

Interesting tidbit: that page also shows that four rare earths are named after
a single village in Sweden (Ytterbium, Terbium, Erbium, and Yttrium)

------
jcfrei
_Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it
back to the UK to be tested. “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested
at around three times background radiation,”_

Three times the background radiation is hardly noteworthy. It would have been
much more interesting to know what they found in the waste water. Sulphuric
and nitric acid?

~~~
jandrewrogers
Variation in background radiation around the world varies by _far_ more than
3x. As you say, this is not a notable observation.

~~~
duskwuff
Hell, the amount of uranium naturally found in granite will make some
countertops emit significant amounts of radiation. I'm not sure how much
exactly, but I'd be willing to bet it's well over 3x the background.

[http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/granite-
countertops.html](http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/granite-
countertops.html)

~~~
wycx
Back when I was an exploration geologist looking for uranium, one of the
things we would do was wander around prospecting with a scintillometer. A
typical background on sandstone would be ~40 cps, whereas we could expect >400
cps on granite, an order of magnitude variation.

What exactly did the article define as the background? The ambient conditions
of the laboratory?

Also, it is not just the uranium in the granite that is responsible for the
radiation. Thorium and potassium are significant as well.

------
devindotcom
Not to sound overly cynical, but this looks like another "naive reporter
discovers how the sausage is made" story. It's always good to get some
perspective on these things, but to this forum it doesn't seem like it will be
a revelation. Tech manufacturing is an enormous and enormously dirty industry.
We're all complicit, of course.

Separately, I'm not sure I like his usage of "dystopian."

~~~
dleibovic
What about this story is not dystopian? We have a city with a toxic sludge
lake created to power our obsession with replacing our phones every year.

~~~
monochromatic
One problem is we don't know if it's actually toxic. It's black and ugly,
sure, but is it actually harmful? The modest radiation figure he quotes (3x
background) is not particularly worrisome.

------
cjensen
A tailings pond 1 mile across instead of dumping the sludge into a river? I'm
genuinely uncertain about what is supposed to outrage me, and the article's
tone implies I should be outraged. It's problematic that it sounds like it
produces lots of air pollution and the workers are probably exposed to nasty
fumes, but I don't see how that is a new thing in China.

~~~
rorykoehler
Sure it could be worse but it could be far better too. Containing this kind of
pollution needs to be set as a priority for the tech industry. The fact that
companies like Apple, Google, Foxconn and Samsung among others are making
grotesque amounts of money as this is happening simultaneously is truly
disturbing. It would probably take only a fraction of their profits to at
least partially yet substantially deal with this problem but instead future
generations will be footed the bill.

~~~
robryan
Isn't that the responsibility of the suppliers? Why should a customer of the
suppliers also foot their bills to be more environmentally friendly.

~~~
acveilleux
No. The problem with making it "the responsibility of the supplier" is that we
are both offloading responsibility and then unwilling to pay the price for the
proper handling of the waste.

So basically along with really low prices, the supplier is bundling a free
absolution of our guilts along with their pollution! Ain't that grand.

~~~
hueving
Yes, it should be the responsibility of the supplier. That's how every other
balanced system works in economics. You only have issues when there is moral
hazard when someone is allowed to shirk their responsibility. Trying to have
someone downstream make up for it is a fool's errand.

In this case, the supplier should be required to put up collateral or purchase
some kind of cleanup insurance for cleanup. i.e. there needs to be a basic
regulation from the government on land granted to mining.

------
x0x0
This was the most interesting bit (imo):

    
    
       The intriguing thing about both neodymium and cerium is that while they’re 
       called rare earth minerals, they're actually fairly common. Neodymium is no 
       rarer than copper or nickel and quite evenly distributed throughout the 
       world’s crust. While China produces 90% of the global market’s neodymium, 
       only 30% of the world’s deposits are located there. Arguably, what makes it, 
       and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and 
       toxic process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable 
       products. For example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and 
       dissolving them in sulphuric and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a 
       huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount of poisonous waste as a 
       byproduct. It could be argued that China’s dominance of the rare earth 
       market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to 
       take an environmental hit that other nations shy away from.
    

ie the rare earths minerals aren't rare, just very toxic to extract

~~~
to3m
Yes. If China stopped selling the stuff entirely then alternative supplies
could be arranged, though not to say the changeover period wouldn't be
inflationary.

This situation reminds me of something I read a few years ago - an interview
with noted (?) right-wing polemicist P. J. O'Rourke, at the time apparentlny
on the merry-go-round promoting his then-new book:
[http://rightwingnews.com/interviews/the-p-j-orourke-
intervie...](http://rightwingnews.com/interviews/the-p-j-orourke-interview/)

Part of the bit that stuck in my mind:

    
    
        [...] the exports, that’s real stuff, and you’re giving it away in
        favor of gold. He [Adam Smith] said imports are the good thing.
        Imports are when you’re getting something you like. You’re getting
        French wine. You’re getting American tobacco. You’re getting furs
        from Russia, getting whatever they were getting back in those
        days. He said exports are the way you pay for those imports. So
        imports are Christmas morning. Exports are January’s Visa bill.
    

(Search for that quote. His whole answer to that particular question is quite
interesting.)

I think of this every time I read anything about acres of toxic sludge and
skies full of clouds of carcinogens. I don't quite share O'Rourke's apparent
glee at how fools will sweat blood to extract raw materials, actual honest-to-
god assets, and then swap them for mere money, money whose ultimate value is
entirely under somebody else's control... but I do wonder what the hell they
are thinking, and what sort of a deal they think they are getting. Because
from my perspective, it looks like they're getting shafted.

~~~
XorNot
Being free of subsistence level farming turns out to be a hell of a motivator.

------
cpncrunch
If you want to see something a bit more dystopian, perhaps have a look at the
oilsands tailing ponds on Canada (which they are admittedly trying to reduce
in size).

------
rpenm
The writer does seem predisposed to casting everything in a sinister light.
Apparently production is bad (environmental costs) but so are production cuts
(market manipulation).

I find this sort of first-person journalism interesting, but not terribly
credible. It lacks perspective or insight. Not a single local is quoted.

------
aaron_m04
Why aren't we recycling these minerals more?

~~~
wycx
I suspect it costs even more to extract the small amounts of REE from scrap
electronics than it does to extract REE from Bayan Obo ore.

Recycling is hard. Particularly in comparison to processing ore. When
reclaiming desirable metals from electronics you are faced with an extremely
heterogeneous starting material - sheet metal cases, fasteners, glass, all
sorts of plastics, fibreglass circuit boards, insulated wire, etc.

In contrast, REE ore is a relatively homogeneous mix of silicates, oxides and
carbonates. All are inorganic, and have sufficiently similar properties that
the bulk material can be crushed then milled to a fine powder ready for
processing. If your resource is competently characterised, you will also know
to a reasonable degree the REE content to expect per tonne of ore.

What is the Nd content of one tonne of e-waste? Hell, what is the composition
of 1 tonne of e-waste? How do you even assay e-waste?

------
amelius
Well, this lake shows that entropy is increasing, which is a perfectly natural
phenomenon :)

