The lanthanoids, or rare-earth elements, are essential to the modern world. We interact with these substances but we don’t know them. We know about copper pipes and iron railings and aluminum cans and stuff like that, but the little bits and pieces of our high-tech world are mostly invisible to us. Nonetheless there is a growing global demand for elements 57 through 71.
Neodymium (Nd, #60) is a little different as most of us have heard of neodymium magnets. These were discovered in the 1980s at a couple of corporate labs and are currently the strongest commercially-available magnets. The alloy is a combination of neodymium, iron, and boron and is called NIB or Neo or NdFeB (the formula is Nd2Fe14B).
They are used in computer hard drives and electric motors and countless other places. You’ve seen them around because they can be purchased for home use:
You have to be careful with those things. Two NIB magnets will snap together suddenly and with a lot of force and good luck getting them apart! If you stick something to the fridge you can expect it to stay in place.
The northern Coast of California and the southern coast of Oregon have some of the best wind resources in the United States, and development of these resources can contribute to meeting the clean energy goals of California, Oregon, and other western states.
Yay for us! But there’s more:
Because the existing transmission grid infrastructure that serves these coastal regions is limited in capacity, major investments in new transmission grid infrastructure will be needed.
There’s always a catch. You have to get the electricity that the turbines generate off-shore to facilities on-shore. And once there the power has to be distributed to the grid. That’s going to take new transmission lines of the 500-kv size. They look like this:
We all know what it is like to travel to and from the Southern Oregon or Northern California coasts—mountains, rivers, canyons, and winding roads. New transmission lines there won’t have the wide-open spaces of the Western deserts like the photo above. It will be a more challenging undertaking. Speaking of that, here’s another bit:
We note that some of the necessary technologies for large-scale development of floating OSW power are neither fully developed nor commercially available at this time.
Well, then. Infrastructure is do-able. It will take a while (more on that later) but the primary technology is not ready. Yet. We all know that wind turbines work. And they work on land and on sea. Offshore wind power is big stuff in the UK, for example. They have developments in the North Sea that can deliver at a gigawatt scale. Unfortunately in the Northern California and Southern Oregon offshore regions slated for wind development the continental shelf plunges rapidly away from the shore. The water is too deep and thus you need floating platforms. That tech is still experimental.
To sum up:
The development of tens of gigawatts of floating OSW power generation on the West Coast will not occur quickly; a successful effort would take decades, and the associated transmission upgrades would also take place over decades.
The Greeks called it “water-silver” or ΰδραργυρος which the Romans converted to hydrargyrum and thus the source of its symbol, Hg.
Mercury, or quicksilver, is weird stuff. It’s a liquid at room temperature, the only such metal with that property. The only other element that is a liquid at room temperature is the non-metal halogen Bromine (Br, #35) . Its lighter sister elements Fluorine (Fl, #9) and Chlorine (Cl, #17) are gases while the heavier Iodine (I, #53) is a solid.
Mercury was of course known to ancient peoples. The Almadén Mine in Spain is at least 2500 years old and mercury was part of Chinese medicine for at least a thousand years before that. There’s evidence of long-ago mercury and cinnabar (mercury sulfide, HgS, the chief ore) use in the New World as well. Here’s cinnabar:
Cinnabar was mined extensively in California. Gold and silver readily combine with mercury to form amalgams and so it is used to extract these metals from their ores. Mercury can be quite a significant toxin and you can imagine the exposures these early miners were subjected too. I had a chance to tour a modern, open-pit gold mine (McLaughline Mine in Lake County) many years ago. Mercury was a major by-product. Mercury does not react with iron and so it is stored in iron flasks. These are standardized to hold 76 pounds of the liquid and that is the international unit by which mercury is bought and sold.
In our day we’ve been warned about mercury contamination of seafood. Industrial waste dumped into our waterways ultimately finds its way to the ocean and into the fatty tissues of fish. This is a serious concern for people who depend on a fish and shellfish diet. The infamous Minamata Bay poisoning in the 1950s that decimated Japanese fishing communities was due to methlymercury, a particularly nasty organo-mercury compound. It wasn’t until several years had passed that the source of the contamination was pinned down—a nearby chemical plant run by Chisso Corporation.
It is possible for a metal to exist in different compounds that have entirely different metabolic effects! Tin is a good example. The metal and its oxides are non-toxic but the stannanes, organo-tin compounds, are quite poisonous.
Most mercury pollution is due to the burning of coal in power plants. In fact, we get more radioactive material dumped into our atmosphere from coal-burning than we do from all the nuclear plants and nuclear facilities in the world combined. Coal is a critical fuel for electricity generation but it comes with an enormous environmental cost.
Many of the uses of mercury compounds, like batteries and fluorescent lights, are being phased out. I still have a mercury thermometer but you don’t see them much any more. The main industrial use these days is as a catalyst for processes like making polyvinyl chlorides (PVCs). About 40 million tons of PVCs are made each year which is the third-most of any plastic polymer. Polyethylene (100 million tons) and polypropylene (80 million tons) are the leaders.
Mercury compounds have been used in various medicinal formulations for millenia. Some of those practices have been thankfully discontinued as they were of dubious value and most likely harmful. Preparations containing micro-doses of mercuric substances have a longer history, especially in Asia, and some of these treatments are still used and have garnered modern medical interest. As Paracelsus famously quipped “it’s the dose that makes the poison.” Funny thing, a mercury preservative (thimerosal) is used in many vaccines at a rate of about 0.003 to 0.01%. For the larger number, that’s 25 micrograms of mercury per 0.5 milliliter dose. Thimerosal is a big sticking point for the celebrity-fueled anti-vaxx crowd. I suppose it’s OK to chase after “traditional” and “holistic” Chinese cures that contain mercury but god forbidyou put it in our vaccines!
Mercury is the god of commerce and financial gain. Partridge says that his name comes from mercor (-ari, -atus) the Latin verb meaning “to trade.” He is also the god of thieves and tricksters. Does anyone else find it interesting that merchants and liars are grouped together? Maybe the Romans were on to something.
I used to tell my students that science was the search for truth, not Truth.
Truth, the one with a capital-T, is the bailiwick of philosophers, theologians, and mystics.
I think what I really meant by lower-case-t truth was things that are true. Things that are true are things that work regardless of your belief system. If we drop you on your head from a height there will be a poor outcome for you. That’s one of those true things. People could still argue the point of course. But when the time comes to test things out they won’t be found.
It’s really hard to sort out true things. Think about how hard it is to sort out medical claims. I know we’ve all done research on the internet about some health topic. Right away we find too many sites, too many papers, too many competing claims, and too many voices screaming for our attention.
The most important priors when it comes to medical claims are simple: most things don’t work. Most simple answer answers are wrong. Humans are complex. Diseases are complex. Single causes of complex diseases like cancer should be approached with great skepticism.
In statistics a “prior” is a probability distribution that you assume to be true before collecting any evidence. That’s fine for scientists, but for the rest of us we can just say that a “prior” is stuff we already know.
Most things don’t work is an excellent rule-of-thumb. It’s tough to follow because we really really really want some things to be true. And it’s hard to let go of biases. Being a skeptic does not mean being a cynic, but it does mean, in Mandrola’s words, that you should “hold pessimistic priors.” He also says “know that stuff that really works is usually obvious.”
In the end, it’s all about accepting uncertainty. The big, important questions have fuzzy answers. Life is not a multiple choice test—it’s closer to an endless series of essays! Since there’s no one correcting your grammar or giving you a grade all we have to produce are rough drafts. Pencils and erasers are allowed and cross-outs are encouraged. And there’s plenty of fresh paper when you run out.
We have a lifespan. That is, we are biological creatures and thus will eventually age and die. We only get so many years to live.
Apparently lots of folks don’t like that notion. This is America after all and we believe in more. We want bigger and better. Life, or lifespan, is just another commodity. It can be improved upon, just like a car or a computer. Lowe’s tells us to never stop improving and by golly that’s just what we are going to do!
I want to be healthy as I age. So I try to exercise, eat right, get a good night’s sleep, blah-blah-blah. I have no illusion that this will help me live LONGER. But I think I will live BETTER. It’s about the QUALITY of my remaining years, not the QUANTITY.
But this is America. We measure quantities. How much is your net worth? What is your IQ? How many miles did you run this week? These are easy questions with easy answers. Hard questions like “are you happy?” or “am I a good person?” require thought, and self-study. There are no easy answers when thinking about personal qualities, or character, or moral dilemmas. How do you measure a life?
All of them are preying on our fear of getting old.
It’s easy to dismiss Tom Brady and Gwyneth Paltrow because they are just famous rich folks and famous rich folks say and do a lot of stupid shit. But when a Harvard scientist jumps in things get more serious.
Unfortunately scientists can be just as full of it as anyone else! They are people, too. And science, as a career, does not generally lead to wealth and fame. That’s why TED talks and bestsellers are important to some scientists—it is usually their only shot at those two pillars of American Greatness (wealth and fame).
Go to any so-called “wellness” site and you’ll see a lot of pseudo-scientific babble surrounding the products. There’s a lot of hand-waving about “research-backed findings” and “new science” and other stuff trying to get you to believe that their stuff is “proven” to work. It’s all hokum. And when real scientists jump into the fray the gobbledygook gets even worse.
Check out Quicksilver Scientific. Their head guy (Dr. Shade!) looks like a legit chemist. He’s done work on mercury speciation (analysis of the different compounds of mercury and how they manifest themselves in the enviroment and in our bodies) and I’ve no doubt he knows quite a bit about metal toxicity.
But Quicksilver is not a health clinic or a research lab. It is a BUSINESS and they make money by selling chemical products. Longevity supplements are there, of course. My personal favorite—detox—is also well-represented. The whole detox thing is so silly. If you lack a liver and kidneys you ought to be concerned, but for those of us fortunate to have those working organs we can let our bodies do their natural detox thing and not waste money on nonsense treatments.
Now before some attorney sends this blog a Cease & Desist order, I’m not saying Quicksilver is quackery. But I will say it sure looks like quackery and sure sounds like quackery. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
Science has helped make our lives better and I suspect the scientific enterprise will continue to do so into the future. We will learn a lot more about health, nutrition, disease, aging, etc. etc. But people will continue to suffer from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). People will still get conned by slick salesmen. People will continue to search for the elusive Fountain of Youth.
There isn’t one. Take care of your body the best you can. But take care of the heart and soul as well. The things that matter in life can’t be put on a graph and they don’t come out of test tubes. If you want a detox, detox your mind! Stop listening to quacks. All they offer is quicksilver, something shiny but slippery, and ultimately poisonous. You aren’t missing out.
Manganese is a trace mineral and is essential to human nutrition. It is critical to steel-making and aluminum production, and found in both fertilizers and alkaline batteries. That’s just some of the many uses of element number 25. The economic importance of manganese nearly rivals its biological one.
Manganese compounds are colorful. If you spent some time in a chemistry lab you may remember the deep ruby color of potassium permanganate (KMnO4) and its pinkish solutions. In 2009 a professor at Oregon State and his graduate students stumbled on a new manganese compound—YInMn (Yttrium, Indium, Manganese)—that was a spectacular blue color. “Oregon Blue” was the first new pigment discovered in decades. Check it out:
Manganese is found in the so-called ferromanganese or polymetallic nodules that litter part of the ocean floor. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has found nodules in both the deep, abyssal plains as well as on seamounts. The resource potential from these nodules is enormous.
Here’s a crab on top of nodule field in the Gosnold Seamount, an extinct submarine volcano in the North Atlantic off the New England coast:
A Parapagurus sp. crab with a coral in the genus Epizoanthus on its back makes its way across a spectacular and unexpectedly densely packed field of ferromanganese nodules blanketing the seafloor of Gosnold Seamount, explored during Dive 16 of the 2021 North Atlantic Stepping Stones expedition.
These days we talk about mining the sea floor. The track record of terrestrial mining is pretty damn poor. Sure, we have a lot of cool stuff, but we made a hell of a lot of ugly messes in order to get it. I think we’ve got a lot to learn about the “final frontier” (no, it’s not space) before we go in and muck it all up.
And then there’s fjords and glaciers and arctic fishing villages and all that. Sounds great—sign me up!
Norway has a lot of money in the bank. Their sovereign wealth fund is over 1.4 trillion dollars. That money comes from oil revenues. Norway is a global player in fossil fuels, exporting both oil and natural gas from their North Sea fields. Most of the country is run on hydro-power so local demand isn’t a problem. They have the most electric vehicles (per capita) of any nation. Also it’s a small country population-wise, only 5.5 million folks. The city of Saint Petersburg in Russia has about the same number of inhabitants.
Norway is now interested in another kind of resource and it’s found on the sea floor. Lumps of accreted minerals, rocks ranging in size from golf balls to bowling balls, are found on the continental shelf and deep ocean surrounding the country. A potentially vast new source of manganese, copper, cobalt, nickel, and other critical minerals, these polymetallic nodules are the mining industry’s hot new commodity. And that makes the ocean bottom the new frontier. Here’s the scope of Norway’s ambition:
This is a completely new thing. It’s true that terrestrial mining is increasingly unpopular, but it is at least a well-understood thing. People know how to do it properly. Any failure by miners to contain their messes and clean up their act is a choice by them. They have the means and skill. Only the desire to cut corners, a consequence of profit-chasing, prevents them (or any business) from being a responsible corporate citizen.
We know nothing about the ocean. We know more about Mars, fer chrissakes. And we know enough about Mars to know it will never be home, that Elon’s grandiose adolescent fantasy is just that.
The ocean really is our home. It’s the source of life. It’s our planet’s heart and lungs. And our planet’s heater and air conditioner, too!
I think this decision to mine the ocean floor is a momentous one. We really need to learn a hell of a lot more about the ocean before we start sullying it with robots and mining waste. At least this stuff will be done remotely. People can’t go down that far and work. Machines (as we’ve learned with the Mars journeys) are much better in harsh environments than people.
We want a green future but it will cost us. And I don’t mean just dollars. How much are we willing to pay? I don’t know the answer to that question. And I still want to go to Norway. Apparently a lot of other folks want to go there as well, it’s a very popular travel destination.
What I really want to do is travel by boat across the Atlantic. Halifax seems a good place to start. Or someplace on the St. Lawrence, like Montreal. A stop or two in Greenland or Iceland would be nice, as would the Shetlands, Orkneys, and Faroes, but the main goal would be the Norwegian coast, and northwards to the Arctic Circle.
I might just wind up staying home, of course. It would be better for the planet. I’m not going to bicycle to Halifax, for instance. There’s plenty of travel to do here, close by. Your mind can certainly take you on plenty of journeys. For most of human history people never ventured more than a few miles from where they were born. We live in an amazing time where we can actually contemplate round-the-world travel. Sailors, sea captains, and the merchant-princes who funded their vessels and journeys always had that option, but most of the world were land-lubbers. Now a remarkable portion of our population has flown in transcontinental airliners and on vessels that traverse vast seas safely and even luxuriously.
The name comes from Greek and means “green twin.” Rare-earth elements (lanthanoids) are similar chemically and are often hard to separate from one another. In the 1840s a recently discovered rare-earth oxide called didymia was reduced to form a metal called didymium. Later, in 1885, it was shown that didymium was actually a mixture of two different metals. After the elements were isolated one was called Neodymium (#60), the other Praseodymium.
Praseodymium is found in magnets and in alloys. The compounds are colorful and used in a variety of glasses. Sound familiar? Most of the elements in the lanthanide/lanthanoid series have similar applications. Our high-tech world demands a LOT of magnets (for electric motors especially) so we will be looking for stuff like praseodymium with great urgency. Familiarize yourself with that section of the periodic table (in red below) as you will be hearing more and more about these substances.
The chief ores are monazite minerals which are also the source of Cerium (#58), Samarium (#62) and other rare-earth elements. Monazites are dense and concentrate in alluvial deposits, forming placers. South Africa and Australia are the major mining regions.
A few months ago I wrote about a new lithium mine at Thacker Pass which is in northern Nevada near the Oregon border. The geologically important area is called the McDermitt Caldera which is an ancient, collapsed volcano, much like Crater Lake (just not filled with water!). It turns out that some folks took another look at the area and decided it was richer in lithium than they thought. In fact, it might be the largest lithium deposit in the world.
Lithium is often extracted from subsurface brines. These fluids are pumped up out of the ground like oil. Unlike oil they are spread out into shallow ponds and the water allowed to evaporate (much like obtaining sea salt) leaving the minerals behind. The salts are processed to separate out the desired minerals. Lithium is usually marketed as lithium carbonate. Here’s a look at lithium distribution in the world:
This lithium deposit in the McDermitt Caldera is composed of clays on or near the surface. Specifically they are “clay-rich lacustrine sediments” (lacustra is Latin for lake) that were laid down in Miocene times (5-23 million years ago). Obviously the climate was much different, today it is a vast desert, then it was probably sub-tropical. Illite and smectite are the primary ores, both are sheet silicates. The mining will be done by open pit methods. You can see on the graphic below that the clay sediments are within tens of meters of the surface:
There is enough lithium in the world to supply automakers with this crucial EV battery material. But there isn’t much in the way of domestic supply, hence the excitement about this deposit in Nevada. It is potentially large enough so that American companies would not have to import any lithium.
During WWII there was not enough domestic uranium to supply the Manhattan Project. About two-thirds of the stuff came from a mine in the Belgian Congo. Thus there is always a strategic interest in local sources of critical minerals.
We are committed to electrifying our vehicle fleets. In the long run this will be a good thing. But EVs have created new demand for things like copper, zinc, and lithium and we’ll have to find new sources (mines!) for them. And there should be incentive to re-visit previously worked sites and to recover new minerals by recycling. And I think it is desirable to have domestic mines because we have, at least nominally, the rule of law here and thus environmental regulations actually have a chance of being enforced. If we are going to make big messes in the ground, let’s at least do it where we can keep an eye on it and clean up after it.
EVs are still vehicles. They still need roads. They still need steel, glass, aluminum, and plastic. And they still need parking lots! There will still be traffic snarls, and congestion, and long, soul-crushing commutes. A cleaner car or truck is better than a dirtier one, but it doesn’t address the real problems. Do we still want a future where cities are increasingly uninhabitable for pedestrians? Do we still want a future where you have to drive everywhere? Do we still want a future where other transit options continue to fade away? We are a car-centric culture, and that car-centrism has shaped the way we live, work, and play. Is it possible to imagine other ways to live, especially ways that don’t require each of us to own and maintain a 5000-pound metal behemoth?
Before we get too excited about future vehicles, maybe we should spend more time thinking about the kind of future we want to live in.
The metallic element Cesium (Cs) is found in the first column (or group) of the periodic table. It sits under the other alkali metals like Lithium (Li, #3), Sodium (Na, #11), Potassium (K, #19), and Rubidium (Rb, #37). If you toss a chunk of a pure alkali metal into a pot of water you’ll get an explosion. The reaction releases hydrogen gas, which is flammable, and a lot of heat, which ignites the gas. If your container isn’t blown apart you can test the pH of the water left behind. You’ll discover it is quite basic (or alkaline), hence the name for the group. (When you rip hydrogen atoms off water molecules you get hydroxide ions which will turn pH paper blue.) I did this reaction every year in science class. We used sodium. Cesium would be much more reactive and thus that much more dangerous (and expensive).
Metallic cesium, like the other metals listed above, oxidizes immediately on contact with air. Thus none of these elements are found in nature except in compounds. Our laboratory sodium was stored under oil, for example.
I should note that much of the world spells the stuff “caesium” not “cesium.” Caesium is the official IUPAC form (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry).
Cesium has a number of radioactive isotopes of which Cs-137 is of interest. It is a by-product of uranium fission and thus present in the biosphere. Besides the bomb tests, nuclear power accidents (like Chernobyl) are the culprit. Cs-137 is used in radiation therapy as well as in a variety of gauges, meters, and measuring devices.
By far the most common use for cesium today is in the oil and gas industry. Cesium formate makes a very dense brine which is used as a drilling lubricant. Interestingly the fluids are mostly recovered and recycled, and cesium formate is particularly desirable because it is non-reactive and of low toxicity.
Cesium is obtained from the mineral pollucite. A large source is in Manitoba, on Lake Bernic, called the Tanco Mine (pictured below).
Mark C. O'Connor 