Phytomining – Extracting Minerals via Plants | Hacker News Reader

Phytomining – Extracting Minerals via Plants

arpa-e.energy.gov

127 pointsGaishan53 comments

If there are plants (there is a patent and a paper describing this in some algae, IDK if it has been replicated or not...) that have preferences (kinetic isotope effect!) for one isotope of uranium over the other you could technically have a uranium enrichment plant made from uranium enrichment...plants.

Have a feeling this kind of idea is born secret

It's not like you can just buy some uranium to experiment with in your home lab, so even if a normie had this idea they would probably not be able to test it in any way.

I guess you missed it when everyone was leaving joke reviews on this product? https://www.amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-Ore/product-reviews...

https://unitednuclear.com/uranium-ore-c-2_4/

I mean, go to Jachymov, plant some plants... success

Theres 4.5 billion tons of the stuff in seawater. Enough uranium to make 70 billion little boy bombs if my math is right, using an algae perhaps you’ve designed to accumulate uranium.

Reminds me of Marooned in realtime, where near the end of civilisation, individuals have the firepower of entire nation states of the past.

You actually can. Small quantities of natural or depleted uranium have no special nuclear regulations associated with them in the United States and can be shipped like other moderately toxic metals.

Possibly relevant:

https://www.geochemicalperspectivesletters.org/article2333/ - "Contribution of the nuclear field shift to kinetic uranium isotope fractionation", Geochemical Perspectives Letters v27

"By following the fractionation of 233U, 235U, 236U and 238U during the enzymatic reduction of hexavalent U to tetravalent U by the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis, we provide the first direct evidence of the nuclear field shift effect during biologically controlled kinetic isotope fractionation."

Isn't this absurd? At a glance, shouldn't it take acres and acres being cared for for months to, then some processing, to extract the same nickel as a mine in a day, maybe a week?

Are the nickel mines dry?

Anyone has a breakdown of the math?

Edit1:

"But while the idea is still at a nebulous stage, there is considerable potential.

“In soil that contains roughly 5 percent nickel—that is pretty contaminated—you’re going to get an ash that’s about 25 to 50 percent nickel after you burn it down,” Dave McNear, a biogeochemist at the University of Kentucky, told Wired.

“In comparison, where you mine it from the ground, from rock, that has about .02 percent nickel. So you are several orders of magnitude greater in enrichment, and it has far less impurities.”"

From :https://singularityhub.com/2024/03/28/these-plants-could-min...

I know there's impressively little metal in most metal ores mined today. It's actually kind of amazing how comparatively cheap metals like copper are, considering they move and crush maybe 1000 or 10000 kgs of rock for every kg of metal (the mine waste isn't pleasant to think about either).

I guess that in contaminated soil, waste ash ponds etc. the metal is in forms which are harder to extract or separate. Because from just weight ratio, it's hard to understand how rock is better.

> considering they move and crush maybe 1000 or 10000 kgs of rock for every kg of metal

This is more or less what I visualize if I get weary of recycling bits of metal (bottle caps, aluminum foil, ...).

Maybe you can combine it with other production, make bio-diesel say?

It would be cool to be able to get the diesel and the metal. The plants have stored calories in some form. There is a way to get energy from them.

I don't think you would want any toxic metals in fuel given the risk of sending it into the air. There are probably real industrial uses, though, like reagents for labs.

AIUI you grow the plants, then process them to get the metals. Then you have plant matter with 'no' metals ... so using that to make bio-diesel seems possible? Depending on the details it might be possible to use the burning of the plants to extract the metals - similar effect (in that you get an energy crop and mineral extraction in one). You raise a valid concern though, thank you.

I think this is an offshoot of rather successful research into phytoremediation, which is using plants to extract harmful things (e.g. lead) from the soil.

Even when plants don't extract significant amounts of material, they can be useful in detecting sources. A paper about using synchrotron analyses to detect gold in eucalyptus comes to mind.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3614

What even, thank you for sharing this, would have never stumbled on it organically. Just the title alone has me intrigued.

> gold particles in Eucalyptus leaves and their relevance to exploration for buried gold deposits

Would love any other recs like this.

Termites strike gold: Ant and termite colonies unearth gold in Australia

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121211095007.h...

( Also used in parts of Africa)

And then there is nano bionic, explosives detecting spinach.

https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanobionic-spinach-plants-detect-e...

I am ignorant about agricultural research budgets, but $10M does not seem like a very serious amount to prove the basic concept and, much more importantly, the viability of scaling an industrial process. This is interesting, but I am guessing this is perceived by the program managers as a total moonshot.

They remediate certain superfund sites with spinach leaves iirc. And I think it’s bacteria that make nutrients from inorganic sources available for the rest of us (ie rocks).

As for budget, 10M seems pretty great for what reads as a “proof of concept” level effort. You can buy a farm for ~1M and 9M left over. (They won’t do that I imagine but just to illustrate.)

The land would be the easy part. Hiring a PI, a team of subject matter experts on botany, metallurgy, and genetics, a few skilled lab technicians, a couple programmers or statisticians, an environmental compliance expert, and whoever else I forgot, probably costs more than $1M/yr and ideally there would be more than a single team. I have no idea what reagents and bespoke GMO plants cost, but it can't be cheap.

My brother told me about these plants. He said that mines would plant them after they've already mined out as much of the ore as possible. They're really good at getting out that last little bit but they're not the first thing to reach for from a mining perspective.

Do they plant them underground? Using artificial light? How are the minerals extracted from the plants? How is this profitable?

Mines are almost never underground nowadays. They dig a big hole, or cut off a whole mountaintop.

Hmm, what plants do they have in mind? (google -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperaccumulators_table_%E2%80... -> sort by accumulation rates)

Turns out 29 of the top 30 are "oops, all Brassica" :-)

Should I be worried that eating cabbage is exposing me to heavy metals?

Edit: sorry that table is only for Nickel, but Brassica shows up against lead too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperaccumulators

And specifically, Brassica oleracea shows up against lead, though no amount is given in that table. The referenced webpage [1] mentions 0.1% to 3% (!) of dry weight, though that's in relation to hyperaccumulators generally.

This article [2] gives an indication of what high concentrations may look like in Brassica oleracea, though I still don't have much idea of what those numbers mean to a human being eating the plant. Considerably less than the 10,000+ mg/kg seen in other plants, thankfully.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110224034628/http://www.civil....

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221171562...

Probably but nearly all food exposes you to toxins.

There's nicotine in French fries and ketchup, eggplants and cauliflower, for example.

CDC 1993

Fries as a stimulant delivery mechanism? Sign me up.

mmm, tin flavour broccoli!

There was a story in a Donald Duck comic, i read as a kid, where Dagobert extracted Gold with the help of a "Gold Flower" in a piece of land, where the gold concentration was to low for manual mining.

Always thought, and got reassured through a study a few years ago about plants that genetically adapted to otherwise toxic amounts of nickel in rainforest areas (linked on HN), that this could be a way to extract minerals in a future more slowed down and sustainable utopian society.

Also really interesting are ways to detox soils through plants. Unfortunately, a local pioneer project for extracting industrial contamination, and than making biogas from the plants, was stopped, because it was just cost covering but not really creating monetary profit. A sad example of, how shortsighted the instant profit capitalism will act, if longterm effects are not integrated into the equation through regulations.

But what to expect from a species that puts great effort into spreading cultivation of seedless wine grapes, just to realize that grapeseeds have live prolonging effects. ; )

I have to wonder whether Dorfman and Mattelart got to that one

I remember one of my teachers about 35 years ago telling us about a specific fern that concentrated gold in its roots. I can't remember the name of it but I'd recognise it by sight. It was interesting because as an organism it's virtually unchanged in appearance since examples of it were laid down in the coal layers. So it's not an unlikely story at all.

A flash of memory immediately after hitting reply and a quick google brings me to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/037567... - looks like gold accumulation is a myth, but it tends to accumulate arsenic which can be an indicator for the presence of gold.

In an article(book maybe) about George Washington Carver [0], they mentioned how how recommended planting cowpeas as they are able to extract nitrogen from the air and put it back into the soil. This helped increase cotton yields when the cotton was planted in the same field after the cowpeas had been harvested.

As a side note, the Haber Process [1] was the industrial version of this and all of the preceding points, if not phytomining per se, feel very similar.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Yes, except Nitrogen comes from the air, and metals come from the soil…

Reminds me of Mel Chin’s art piece Revival Field[0], an attempt to remediate a hazardous waste area in Minnesota with plants. Apparently it is still going after more than 30 years.

[0] https://melchin.org/oeuvre/artist-writing-revival-field/.

In the game "the Riftbreaker" (Tower defense game with resource gathering / research tree) you can use plants to mine rare materials. How cool that it isn't far from reality.

I wonder if you could apply some of the same tech or principles from algae based diesel to extract minerals from a slurry rather than slow growing macroscopic plants?

Also phytoremediation: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-04/documents/a_...

Also covered here; https://singularityhub.com/2024/03/28/these-plants-could-min...

Primitive Technology made a crude knife from the iron in scum collected from a forest stream[0].

0. https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o

That’s nearly miraculous, if true. I have no reason to disbelieve the guy, but wow, I had no idea there is so much iron available in the wild like that.

I used to collect magnetic ore from sand using magnets in childhood. If magnets were available in history, then a certain tribe didnt have to pimp their women to obtain iron nails from sailors who ripped them from the very ship they were supposed to maintain, or modern western countries didnt have to burn down barns to recover nails.

Iron is widely distributed across the globe. Nearly all soil will have some iron in it. I'm actually in PEI right now to watch the eclipse, and the soil here is famous for it's red colour caused by the high iron-oxide content.

Yes, I'm used to iron filings on the beach in So Cal, but somehow I didn't think it would be in such high amounts in bacteria.

This is a great approach with huge opportunities for genetic modifications of in use organisms in correlation with their symbiotic relationships.

Magical Crops but irl

I do this when I eat plants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com