If you associate Phosphorus (P) with phosphorescence, or glowing in the dark, you’d be on the mark. Red phosphorus, the most stable form of this multiple personality non-metal, can be converted to the volatile and explosive white phosphorus by simple friction. Alas:
“Fósforos” is how a Spanish-speaker says “matches.” And of course phosphorus is great for fireworks and other incendiary devices.
But that’s not why phosphorus is important. When I took Biology in High School I learned CHNOPS. That stood for Carbon-Hydrogen-Nitrogen-Oxygen-Phosphorus-Sulfur. Those six elements are essential for life and we were expected to memorize that. You may remember learning about ATP and ADP, in both cases the “P” stands for phosphorus. In DNA and RNA molecules the nucleotides are linked by phosphate groups.
In the United States we mine about 30 million tonnes of phosphate rock each year. Wolfram Alpha tells me that all the terrestrial wild animals on earth weigh about 70 million tonnes. That’s just for perspective! Anyway, most of that is used to make fertilizers.
Without fertilizers we would not be able to grow enough crops to feed ourselves and our animals. Vaclav Smil (in Growth, p. 444) estimates that corn (maize) production in the precontact Americas was about one ton per hectare for the societies that practiced cultivation. Eleven tons per hectare is the norm for a 21st century farm. That of course comes at an enormous cost in energy and environmental degradation.
Miners like to remind people that what can’t be grown has to be mined. In the case of phosphorus, it has to be mined so stuff can be grown!
(That’s 2025 for those of you who didn’t go to Catholic school.)
I’m not alone thinking that Descartes got it backwards. He said cogito ergo sum or “I think therefore I am.” It seems like it ought to be sum ergo cogito, or “I am therefore I think.”
This is the source of all our troubles: we think too much.
Either way, whether you cogito first or not, there’s just too damn much of it. Cogitating, that is.
But I’ve come to the rescue. My first, only, and last New Year’s Resolution is/was to quit goofing off on this blog and do something constructive. So, I have. I invented a new thing. I call it EUMENTICS™. Now, you can use it, but you have to give me credit. I mean, it’s free. (But you have to give me credit. That’s what the ™ stands for: This is Mark’s.)
Anyway, EUMENTICS™ is my new self-help system. The name comes from the Greek “eu-” meaning “well” and the Latin “ment-” meaning “mind.” So EUMENTICS™ is a mental health program. It’s very simple. All you have to do is follow the instructions I deliver here on the blog each week.
(And if you benefit from my program and wish to include me on your yearly donation list, please note I accept only greenbacks and do not write receipts, thank you.)
It’s a post-truth world, my friends. You need to shine a flashlight into all that darkness out there. This is where EUMENTICS™ comes in! Like all good systems, we start small and work our way up. You learn one key mental health lesson each week. At the end of the year your wellness will be off the charts!
Today we have a bonus—not one but TWO lessons. Are you ready?
Lesson One: always watch sports with the sound off.
I mean, really, this one is almost no advice at all. You should have been doing this already! What were you thinking listening to all that inane babble from weird guys in nice suits and bad shoes? Goodness. I recommend (note: ‘recommendations‘ don’t have to be followed, just the ‘lessons’) making up your own commentary. Or getting shitfaced and listening to Captain Beefheart. Anything. Anything at all. Guaranteed mental health improvement, and I mean that in a strictly money-back guarantee kind of way.
Lesson Two: never watch sports.
OK, if you have to, but be sure to follow Lesson One. Those of you who know me know I’m a lifelong San Francisco Giants baseball addict. It’s a curse. A monkey on my back. But I’m dealing, man. I’m coping. I’m going all-in on EUMENTICS™ for this one, not to worry.
I’m happy to update Lesson Two. That’s the best thing about EUMENTICS™, that creativity and spontaneity are encouraged. I haven’t even gotten to the end of the post and I’ve already changed my mind a half dozen times. That’s very eumentical, I should say. Flexibility in the face of feedback. In this case, I can already hear what you are saying.
Lesson Two: never watch TV
See, that takes care of the sports junkies. If there is no TV at all, then they don’t have a case. They aren’t being discriminated against. Everyone else suffers, too! And you gotta have some suffering or else no one will take EUMENTICS™ seriously.
Speaking of seriously, I suppose I’ve gone too far with Lesson Two. Let’s re-write it.
Lesson Two: always watch TV when in the grip of a mild hallucinogen.
A gummy, for example. Stronger stuff will make you psychotic. You just need a gentle reminder that everything you see is packaged for your entertainment. That little black box smooths off the rough edges of life and presents it homogenized and pasteurized and emulsified into intellectual Cheez Whiz. And despite our deepest desires, man cannot live on Cheez Whiz alone.
So, tune in next week for more solid advice. As soon as I come up with Lesson Three you’ll be the first to know. Be sure to tell your friends about EUMENTICS™ and be just as sure to give me credit.
You don’t have to be a tobacco smoker to get lung cancer. Exposure to such hazardous materials as asbestos and radon gas can also lead to a malignant tumor (carcinoma) in the lungs. We associate lung cancer with behavior, but you can just be unlucky, as is the case with radon gas exposure.
Do you live here? These are the places in the US with lots of radon:
The key is hard to read but the red states in this case are those with over 4.0 pCi/L of radiation exposure. The unit is called a Curie (Ci) and this particular measurement is in picoCuries (or 10-12) and that’s per Liter (L). No one knows what a safe level of radon exposure is. Outside, you get about 0.4 pCi/L so the EPA decided the indoor action level should be 4.0 pCi/L, or ten times that. On the map the yellow states range from 2.0-4.0 pCi/L and the green states come in at less than 2.0 pCi/L. The average level of indoor radon exposure across the US is 1.3 pCi/L.
Radon (Rn, #86) is the heaviest of the noble gases. It hardly exists at all. All the isotopes are radioactive and have short half-lives. Radon is a daughter product from the decay of radium-226, which is itself part of the decay chain of uranium-238. All the radon on the earth’s surface comes via this process. Uranium and radium are naturally occurring metals that are found in rocks all over the world. Mostly radon gas escapes from the soil and dissipates into the atmosphere. But we trap the stuff in our buildings and thus we get exposed.
This hazard—radon gas exposure—is entirely natural. The very ground we stand upon oozes the stuff. It is invisible: colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It’s is also measurable, and thus can be dealt with.
While we rely on private companies to do radon mitigation in buildings, the rest of our radon apparatus is run by the government. Public health agencies and environmental and regulatory bodies at all levels, local, state, and federal, are responsible for radon education and abatement.
There’s a place in Arizona that’s filled with copper. It’s called Resolution. A joint venture between two of the largest mining outfits in the world wants to mine that copper.
Rio Tinto and BHP are the two mining companies. They are international firms but both have headquarters in Melbourne. Mining is a bigger part of the economy in Australia than in most developed nations.
Rio Tinto has a market cap of $100 billion or so and BHP rates about $130 B. Note that these are dwarfed by behemoths like Apple ($3.4 trillion) and Amazon ($1.8 T).
The two mining giants have sunk several billion into the potential mine while they navigate the regulatory and political landscape. The underground porphyry copper deposit that’s got everyone so fired up is massive. It could potentially supply 25% of US copper demand. The mine life is expected to be sixty years.
Naturally this is right in the middle of sacred land. A proposed land swap with the Forest Service and some promises to protect indigenous sites seemed to have pushed the process towards approval. But there’s still strong opposition. A few years back Rio Tinto destroyed 46,000-year-old Aboriginal caves in Western Australia. They don’t have much of a track record in other places, either. BHP has its own infamous case, the 2015 dam collapse in Brazil, and they have a similar history to their rival/partner.
The most compelling argument seems to be about water. Mines need a hell of a lot of water. Even if both BHP and Rio Tinto suddenly decided to be the best companies in the world and run a neat, clean mine, they will still use mountains and mountains of water. And this in the middle of the Sonoran desert!
The San Carlos Apache Tribe is taking their opposition to Resolution to the US Supreme Court. If we want a clean energy future, we have to have copper. Lots of it. That’s not in question. How we get the stuff—that’s where the questions are.
It’s a desert around here and things don’t grow well unless you water and fertilize the hell out of them. And protect them from the sun. We’ve lost several landscape plants this year because of the excessive solar radiation and summer heat.
But there’s one plant that the rules don’t apply to. The grand champion of desert hardiness: the trumpet vine or trumpet creeper, Campsis radicans.
We buried our original plant under concrete when we expanded our patio. No problem, the trumpet vine simply moved over a few feet and found some sun and re-appeared on the southwest corner of the house! It is thriving there, producing spectacular displays of tubular orange flowers. And we don’t water it. It survives on its own.
We like volunteers. This one is native to North America, but east of the Mississippi. It’s a weed in most places back there. Here in the West we have a lot of garden cultivars bred for hardiness. I have to say those plant nerds really pulled it off!
Another trumpet vine volunteered in another spot on the house and it is thriving as well. And speaking of volunteers the flowers attract Anna’s hummingbirds. We get to watch them fly and feed for free. They chatter and dive bomb each other. It’s quite a show.
Hummingbirds are tough, too. We were once chased out of a camping spot in the Mojave desert many years ago by a determined duo of what I think were Black-chinned hummers. They kept buzzing us until we moved a few yards away from a particular clump of shrubs. Then we all got along.
It’s hot and dry out there. Take care of yourselves.
Color TV broadcasts started in this country in the 1950s but really didn’t take off until the mid-60s. In 1972 half of the television sets in the US were color. I remember our family getting a color TV (and cable!) right about then. Very few all black-and-white TV stations remained by the end of that decade.
One of the barriers to color reception was red. Color is displayed on screens by means of phosphors. These are materials that emit light when exposed to radiant energy. In a TV, an electron beam activates the luminescent substance. Different chemicals give off different colors.
In the case of red, the key breakthrough was the use of the lanthanoid or rare-earth element Europium. Yttrium orthovanadate (YVO4) is “doped” with a small amount of europium oxide (Eu2O3) to produce a bright red glow. TV sets contain about a half a gram to a gram of Eu2O3.
The European Union takes advantage of europium oxide’s luminescent property by embedding it in fibers in their banknotes. This is an anti-counterfeiting measure. You can see the red stripe that emerges under UV light in the 100-euro bill:
Europium has no known biological role and is not toxic. Europium is one of the rarest of the lanthanoids. In the Mountain Pass Mine in California, our only domestic source of REEs (rare earth elements), europium is a tiny fraction (0.2%) of the ore.
One of the reasons that energy costs go up over time is that it gets harder to extract a resource as it gets depleted. The oil that was close to the surface or in easily accessible sites was pumped out first. These days we need deeper wells. Or wells in crazy places like the Arctic or the open ocean. And we have to employ new methods like hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).
“Furthermore, as accessible high-grade deposits become rare, mining companies are increasingly targeting deeper or lower-grade deposits, which require more sophisticated, hazardous and costly extraction techniques.”
If you can’t grow it, you have to mine it. But it is getting harder, and it takes longer. The “green energy” transition will require enormous investments in mines and minerals. That’s going to require planning ahead as the lead times are significant. Take a look at the chart below. Mines are big, messy, complex things with a lot of impacts. And the industry hasn’t done much to win the public’s trust so you can understand the pushback in the form of increased regulations.
Of course we could always just get our minerals from mines in the third world, or places where there is little or no oversight. But miners don’t like to invest in sketchy places. They like law and order. They want to keep their properties and their profits. Here at home we have the regulations in place so that we can mine intelligently. And we have courts and rules and banks and everything else for businesses to prosper.
So, let’s get those shovels in the ground already!
Tellurides are minerals formed with the telluride anion (Te2-). Both gold and silver form tellurides, the most common being a mineral called sylvanite [(Au,Ag)Te4]. Gold and silver were mined extensively around the town of Telluride in Colorado, but interestingly no gold telluride minerals have been found there! Seems like the Chamber of Commerce needs to get on that one. The local mines were rich in lead, zinc, and copper as well.
Tellurium (Te, #74) is a metalloid in Group 16 of the periodic table. Groups (or “families”) are the columns in the table—the rows are called periods. Tellurium is in the same family as oxygen, sulfur, and selenium. There are fungi that can substitute tellurium for either selenium or sulfur in metabolic processes but it otherwise has no biological function.
Tellurium is usually obtained as a by-product of copper refining. Its primary use is in solar cells. Cadmium telluride (CdTe) panels are more efficient than the more common crystalline silicon types so expect demand for this rare element to increase.
California is no stranger to fortune-seekers. The state was founded on the Gold Rush and built by the Oil Boom.
Silicon Valley is our latest El Dorado. Our tech overlords have a new hype wand. They call it AI. And no one wields the gilded baton better than Santa Clara’s NVIDIA.
The computer systems and computer programs that make up what we call AI need the best chips, and NVIDIA makes them. Of course these massive projects have an equally massive energy demand. We don’t see the carbon and environmental footprint of the tech industry and that gives them an unassailable clean image. The Gold Rush and the Oil Boom spawned a lot of environmental laws, by comparison. Big Tech off-shores all its dirty work, and their toxins seep quietly into the groundwater.
FrikEls over at mining.com put together a graphic comparing the market capitalization of the fifty biggest mining companies in the world to one tech company, NVIDIA. There’s no comparison. All fifty companies combined just tops a trillion dollars (~$1.4T). NVIDIA is worth more than twice that!
You can’t have AI or Big Tech without copper and silicon and aluminum and gold and germanium and gallium and arsenic and so on. And so on and so on. Minerals are the basis of society. That is, all the non-food aspects of society. What can’t be grown must be mined. And without mining there’s no modern agriculture.
But AI is the stuff of dreams. And that beats digging holes in the ground any day.
The current estimate of world population is 8.1 billion or 8100 million or 8,100,000,000,000 people. That’s 8.1 x 1012 (8.1 E 12) for you math nerds. If you can’t do a superscript, exponents are commonly indicated with a caret (shift-6) as in 8.1 x 10^12.
That’s a lot of folks. Population growth mainly occurs in poor places. As people get wealthier and freer, they live longer and have fewer children. Wealthy countries have slow or stagnant population growth. Poor countries are growing fast. That’s why so many people emigrate—they are seeking better economic opportunities. Wealthy countries like ours benefit from immigration. We need a younger workforce.
We have the ability to feed the world. And to house the un-housed. We aren’t going to run out of space or resources. Economic growth, fueled by technological innovation, will ultimately bring people out of poverty and misery. Wherever the rule of law and the opportunity for economic growth exist people can be lifted to a higher station in life.
Our future does not have to be the dystopian nightmare our Silicon Valley overlords have imposed upon us. We don’t have to spend all our energy and resources upgrading our cell phones. We could focus on food, water, shelter, and civilization instead. We don’t need any more social media platforms. We need a society that cares about those less fortunate than ourselves.
Mark C. O'Connor 
