A solid-state “atomic channel” for separating rare earth elements | Hacker News Reader

A solid-state “atomic channel” for separating rare earth elements

pme.uchicago.edu

102 pointsMarcoDewey34 comments

Nice. Here's MP Minerals' plant for doing that, in Alliance, TX.[1] It's a modest sized plant in an industrial park. It's fed by a huge mine in California, which has an onsite beneficiation plant. Beneficiation is the first step of separation - sorting the good stuff out from the unwanted dirt, with rock crushers, screens, and flotation. This being "rare" earth mining, the amount of good stuff is tiny relative to the unwanted dirt. This new technology works on the separated good stuff.

Although these separation plants aren't big compared to mines, US mines had been sending rare earth ores to China for processing. That's gradually moving back to the US as more separating plants are built.

[1] https://vimeo.com/1062796280/dc953ac6d5?

That's one of those corporate videos that's totally useless. Lot's of "pretty" pictures with drone footage, but there's no there there. Who do videos like this work on?

Gloss for potential investors / capital raisers wanting a bit more than the dry quarterlies and annual reports as they prep for raising 50 or a 100 million in more forward capital loans for processing expansion.

It's literal lube for the grinding wheels of commerce.

Some can get by on the technical reports and capex and projected returns, others want a bit of "a vision" / proof of big shed and machinery.

Just one nitpick.

Literal lube is lube. This is not lube. This is a video.

Literally a video for lubricating acceptance of a project. Literally.

Literal video, metaphorical lube.

> The new approach relies on a layered form of manganese oxide—a mineral material with the right size layers to allow ions to slip in and out and to differentiate rare earth elements.

Seems literal to me!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite#Drilling_mud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Uses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite#Other_properties

It's a video about literal lube!

But a video isn't literally lube :) it's a video.

By Oxford English Dictionary literal definition, not all lubricants are fluids.

  Etiquette is a mere lubricant of the order of society.

OED entry "lubricant" (B.noun)

  Fine music‥has a sensible effect in‥animating and as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty.

OED entry "lubricate" (2.a verb)

Lube also used for cash - greasing palms, etc.

Using the a non-lube to lubricate is still metaphorical.

But, I just ignore the word literally and english still works just fine

Ignoring literally is A-Ok in my book (and forum comments) but I would point out that a "non lube" used to ease a transition, smooth an action, or remove friction is <cough>literally</cough> a lubricant (by definition and hundreds of years of common usage).

If by "literally" in the original post you mean the modern "pay attention to these words in particular".. why leave that in?

We are literally already paying attention. It's literally redundant.

And yet you missed the the double the.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

There's something to be said for that. If the Slate electric car people had a picture of their factory, they'd be more credible.

Is that mine in California the one powered by burning sulfur? If I recall correctly, they need sulfuric acid to extract the minerals, and they need power, and burning sulfur to make sulfuric acid produces steam, and sulfur is easier to ship than the acid, so...

(I could be confusing this with a hard rock lithium mine.)

Yes: the planned Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Nevada.

What's the general process for the initial separation of unwanted dirt? I've worked in a zinc smelter a long time ago, the initial stage was roasting, heating the ore to 900C to burn off unwanted components (such as sulfur, which went on to become sulfuric acid), and to melt other components.

I guess I'm surprised at the absence of flue stacks and cooling towers at the facility shown in the video.

Perhaps the facility in the video only shows "cleaner" downstream processing for marketing appeal, or separation processes are fundamentally different?

60 Minutes had some coverage of the beneficiation plant.[1] For rare earths, that's mostly grinding and sorting by density and magnetic properties. It's a large plant near the mine. Bags of rare earth ore worth about $120,000 per pallet come out, and those are transported to the Texas location for the next step, which has a lot more heat and chemistry.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/60-minutes_rareearths-activit...

MP is well positioned in the REE processing space -- now if the share price would stop collapsing then companies in the critical minerals sector would be able to raise capital more easily (MP is the bellwether for the sector)

Thanks. Now MP is on my radar.

Certainly at $41, a 52 week low, it's a fire sale (hit $100 back in October.

They're totally at the mercy of world rare earth prices, which are manipulated by China. But they now have some cushion from government and GM funcing.

Collapse in MP, the minerals sector in general, and every high growth sector in the market is institutional derisking in the face of massive leverage ($1.4 trillion in margin loans), which has triggered an historic collapse in high beta stocks -- nothing to do with rare earth prices, particularly for MP which has guaranteed price floors.

So,the big players have taken a wrecking ball to minerals by shorting the sector to oblivion, but will have no problem riding the wave back up once the bottom is in...

Right. Since the 1980s, the Mountain Pass mine has gone bankrupt and shut down twice. Not because they did anything wrong, but because the prices of rare earths temporarily dropped below their production cost. Here's a general rare earth price graph.[1] It's tough having a business with fixed costs with a 10:1 price variation.

MP Minerals is now getting subsidies from both the U.S. Government and General Motors, both of which want a reliable source of magnets outside China. There are other sites in the US and Australia which could be developed if it was profitable. (Operating in Greenland, per Trump, is silly. The costs of operating anything big there are very high. No roads, no infrastructure, only a few months a year of ice-free construction time...)

[1] https://www.mining.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/image-9-76...

> Chong Liu and her colleagues knew that one of the differences between rare earth ions was the size of the water shell surrounding each one when they are dissolved in solution. Lighter rare earths like lanthanum have larger first water shell, while heavier rare earths like dysprosium have a smaller first shell. Taking advantage of that size difference, Chong Liu’s group engineered manganese oxide so that the gaps between its stacked layers were only a few water molecules wide. Then, they squeezed raw mixtures of rare earth elements inside.

Cool! Does this only work with a mixture of mostly rare earths, or can ores be "squeezed...inside"? Also, is the end product metal or intercalated manganese oxide?

Interestingly (well to me) this is also how some ion channels in cells work - the solvation shell (water cage) allows protein pores to distinguish between sodium and potassium.

Not sure this is the best paper, just a random pick :

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09692...

Huh. More complex than I understood:

"...there are two groups of hypotheses explaining the selectivity on the basis of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The first group mainly considers flexibility/mobility of the carboxyl groups in the EEEE ring that provides a preferable space-charge environment for partly hydrated Na+ ions to pass and an unfavorable environment for K+.19,20,21 The second group proposes the “steric” selectivity mechanism, suggesting that the SF of Navs is not wide enough to let a fully hydrated K+ pass through, while fully hydrated Na+ traverses through the pore without a significant barrier"

Different paper about the 'selectivity filter' https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10....

"The backbone carbonyl oxygens plus the hydroxyl group of the threonine form four ion binding sites, called S1 to S4 from the extracellular side (see Figure 1A), and they perfectly mimic the hydration shell of potassium ions"

What I like about the selectivity filter is that it uses the backbone carbonyls.

Do you know if this question has been subjected to femtosecond microscopy?

I wonder if an organic method for rare-earths separation, say a manganese ligand, could be constructed biologically and then put to work as a catalyst. Would still have to deal with solvent recovery, though, if non-aqueous…

"“Rare earths always come mixed together, whether they’re in an ore or in a waste stream..."

What these College level projects never address is real world experience with Thorium. "Mixed together" very often includes Thorium. So as you run your process you either leave be hid a pile of Thorium as you extract what you want, or you end up with a pile of Thorium that you extracted.

While Thorium is useful, as I'd love to have a Thorium powered pebble-bed reactor buried in my backyard to power my house, it will attract government regulators when the pile gets big enough causing no end of expansive paperwork on radiological issues.

This is why places like Coal Mines don't extract the Lithium from the Tailings. They just don't want to deal with the radiological issues.

This seems very similar to the ion-exchange membrane rowow et all have been refining on youtube over the last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luulTI1RKHE&t=114s. Rowow himself has videos on using electrochemistry to extract rare elements from mining waste.

Very interesting, even if it is at an early stage and I have to wonder what the throughput would look like in an industrial process. There's value in proving that this approach can work even if it doesn't become the basis for separation plants in the future.

It appears to me that the "water envelope" refers to chemical hydrates of water.

So the nanostructures allow a maximum size of hydrates.

How is this flushed after collection? What impels the captured molecules out of their recesses?

and it was created by Chinese born Professor and Student.

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