The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust | Hacker News Reader

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

bbc.com

153 pointspierre-renaux37 comments

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 [2] http://www.desertreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/DR_Sp...

"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 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)

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?

Exactly my thoughts. He should have linked to another article or some sort of table detailing the water quality.

It would also be interesting to know the air quality in that city as well.

The scenery and pictures don't do much to elicit a reaction from me. There are quite a few natural places as bleak and "hellish" as the landscape he describes, some that people actually appreciate for their austere "beauty". I'd like to know more about the impact on wildlife and people, maybe what it looked like before and after.

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

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

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.

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."

He definitely sounds like he formulated his opinion before he visited, and then shaped what he saw into an article justifying that opinion.

You can tell because of all the presumptions he makes and suggestions that he never backs up with fact.

I agree; not sure it was a naive reporter or just one looking to report something sensational (truly objective journalism is harder and harder to find).

But I would disagree that even here on this forum a lot of people are really aware of the true environmental impact of tech manufacturing. We've pushed most of that off to remote regions of asia that nobody in the west regularly sees or worries about. We just see the end product, be it finished hybrid or electric vehicles, wind turbines, or the latest gadget conspicuously packaged in recycled paperboard.

Clearly some people were interested or it wouldn't have reached the front page. I'm not sure what your point is -- what's wrong with another "naive reporter discovers how the sausage is made" story?

For me it made the costs of electronics manufacture more concrete. Yes, it could have been better reported, but the article has value.

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.

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.

I agree, it is overblown environmental concern. A city full of coal dust like a Dickens novel, with industrial pipes all over the place and pipes pumping mysterious black goo into a lake a few miles away sounds pretty.

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.

Tomorrow: This reporter was shocked to discover what happens with your garbage. They throw it in man-made heaps!

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.

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

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.

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.

I would say it's the responsibility of everyone in the supply chain. Less pass the buck and more ownership.

Looks like we have already dealt with the problem by putting the waste into a giant lake.

Earth is gigantic. This lake takes up maybe, what, .00001% of surface area? And is even less consequential by volume.

Exactly - if this area is localized and isn't doing something like slowly polluting ground water, then I'm not entirely sure there's a problem here.

The earth is not gigantic. It's tiny and it's also the only one we have. If this was an isolated case then maybe I would agree that it could be let slide but the effect humans are having on the environment is unprecedented and causing a mass extinction. There is no excuse for this kind of small mindedness. It would take very little effort to contain the waste in tanks until we figured out what to do with it.

There is an excuse for this "small mindedness," it's that I think human well-being is strictly more important than the well-being of other organisms. And to think otherwise would be monstorous.

Clearly human well-being is intrinsically linked with planetary well-being. We are part of the system not separate from it. We are screwing ourselves by screwing the planet.

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

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...

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.

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

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).

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.

Why aren't we recycling these minerals more?

Presumably, since they're actually fairly common, and not rare at all, extracting them from the surface of a smartphone is no easier than extracting them from dirt itself.

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?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com