Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves | Hacker News Reader

Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

news.metal.com

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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.

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.

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.

I have a couple too, but I broke one by letting it leave my hand too far from the surface.

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.

Bear in mind that some of your more elderly relos might have heart related hardware that might be damaged by a strong magnetic field. Luckily ... inverse squared law. You are probably safe if you recommend that granddad (1) doesn't rub his chest on your fridge.

I have loads of the bloody things - I dismantled a Equallogic PS6something that had 30 odd discs in it for recycling the other day. I, sorry: "we" still have four more old Eqls and a stack of discs removed from old PCs. You can break the case of a 3.5" disc with a lump hammer and cold chisel and then unscrew or break out the magnets quite quickly. I need to look into breaking a 2.5" disc. You could speed things up with a bandsaw with a suitable blade and a careful cut.

(1) I'm called Granddad by two little girls, so let's ditch the ageist bollocks (po faced emoji). How about great granddad instead! My dad does sport a heart restart device (I can't remember the name) and it is probably not going to work very well after close contact with a neodymium magnet that nearly tore off one of my fingernails - OK I nearly did the tearing but it was the vice that did the holding with my fridge.

[edit - formatting]

It’s actually inverse cube for magnets - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_between_magnets : “One characteristic of a dipole field is that the strength of the field falls off inversely with the cube of the distance from the magnet's center.”

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?

I would have though it would far easier to find magnets in a massive pile of trash than pretty much anything else.

They stick to metal.

I think you're confusing 'magnet' with 'magnets so strong they create plasma when they collide with each other'. If you manage to put them into a bin, they will Voltron into an even more obnoxious magnet.

And that's not counting all of the ferrous things in your equipment that it can stick to and cause damage by friction or backing things up into something that isn't designed for back pressure.

Strange article. Economy in the dump. 75% inflation rate rendering everyone's money useless. Great time to "discover" a massive stockpile of hard assets.

"drilling work started in 2011"

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.

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

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.

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.

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 than tin because they don't form ore bodies like tin does under geochemical influences.

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

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

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.

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...

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."

million mt? Is that million megatons? And which rare earth elements are they?

Wouldn't it be 694 million metric tonnes? I million megatons is a hell of a lot.

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

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.

Awesome, thanks this clears it up. And are these reserves measured, inferred or indicated? Is there a PFS?

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?

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.

It reminds me of a recent HN story telling us not to trust any number you see in a news story.

mt = millitonne = kg, obviously.

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-...

I wonder if today's metal future prices crashed for this reason.

Making them a little less rare.

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.

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.

Why not?

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