How do jewellers capture every last particle of gold dust? (2017)

Groves' deputy, Nichols, who was responsible for the loan, also told the story in more detail in 1987 memoir, "The Road to Trinity."

Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.

Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...

6000 metric tons of silver is approximately 192,904,200 troy ounces, and 6000 US tons of silver is approximately 175,000,000 troy ounces.

Would that be your partner?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GPWJPLcHg

I call marketing stunt. Most unlikely not a truthful representation of what to expect when doing it yourself.

Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).

Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.

That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.

For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).

No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.

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† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.

A vinyl sheet will just lose it to people's boots.

10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day. So he might be happy to make the trade-off for having a nice carpet.