Tellurides are minerals formed with the telluride anion (Te^2-). 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.

NVIDIA is now the most valuable company in the world. Or maybe not. These things change on a whim.

Frik Els 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.

July 11 was World Population 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.

Tungsten is tough stuff. It’s as dense as gold or uranium and it is also the hardest metal to melt. And it has the highest tensile strength. A small amount of tungsten added to steel makes the steel stronger. Tungsten alloys are thus everywhere.

The symbol for Tungsten is W from the German word wolfram and the main ore of tungsten is wolframite.

One of the interesting compounds made with tungsten is tungsten carbide or WC. It’s a powder and can be shaped into many forms. It’s as hard as corundum or sapphire, corrosion-resistant, and is many times stronger than steel.

When fine powders are compressed to a point just short of liquefaction they fuse together. The process is called sintering. Brass is commonly sintered, for example. Sintering is used with tungsten carbide because of the very high melting point of both elements. Sintered WC has many applications for machine tools, especially in extreme environments, and its hardness makes it a great abrasive. It has to be polished with diamonds but it holds its luster and doesn’t break or scratch. Sounds like good stuff to make jewelry from, and that is a major use for WC. Here’s an example:

We attended the fourth NoirCon in Philadelphia in the fall of 2014. That was a long journey—we took the train. This one is a little closer. A drive down the east side of the Sierras seems like the way to go.

The guy on the poster is the late American author David Goodis.

I turn 65 on the 13th of November. NoirCon will be a fine birthday present!

Apollo astronauts were my heroes when I was a kid. I remember Apollo 8 vividly, and I did a report on Apollo 9 for school. And everyone of my age group remembers Apollo 11 and the moon landings. Bill Anders, one of the three-man crew of Apollo 8, died last week at age 90. He was still flying and was killed in his T-34 while attempting a stunt maneuver near his home in northwest Washington. I hope I’m still walking if I make it to 90!

Anders took a photograph of the earth in December of 1968 when Apollo 8 was rounding the far side of the moon. No humans had ever seen that view. The photo came to be called “Earthrise” and is one of the most famous images of our time.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.” (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw99wj5e5q8o)

The Apollo missions were powered by the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V. It took 68 hours for Apollo 8 to reach the moon. And that was just three guys. Imagine outfitting a larger crew for a more extended stay. It’s easy to see that space travel is a pretty silly notion. Space exploration on the other hand, is pretty cool. Apollo 8 was 56 years ago. Humans haven’t traveled any further into space since then but they’ve certainly explored a lot more.

Robots are better for space than humans anyway. Humans need a blue planet. Robots can live and work in a vacuum. They can be irradiated. They can operate round-the-clock. They can travel further, see farther, collect more data, and best of all they don’t have to come home safely. They’re cheaper, too.

We know more about space than we do about our own blue planet, especially the blue part. The oceans are the source of all life. We should take better care of them.

Maria Sklowdowska, better known to the world as Marie Curie, discovered the element Radium with the help of her husband Pierre. It was her research—Pierre was smart enough to recognize his wife’s genius— and he abandoned his work in favor of hers. The original power couple (along with Henri Becquerel) were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity. She coined the term.

Radium is a daughter product. Naturally-occurring uranium decays and radium is the result. Curie was also awarded another Nobel, this time for chemistry, in 1911. She was a widow by then, Pierre having been killed in a road accident in 1906. Speaking of daughters, their daughter Irene was awarded the Chemistry Nobel in 1935 (along with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie).

Marie Curie was active in WWI setting up X-ray units in field hospitals. It is likely that those exposures led to her death in 1934 at age 66 from anemia. Although she and her husband were both exposed to lots of ionizing radiation in their laboratory work, and their papers are still too “hot” for researchers to handle, they likely would not have been sickened by radium without ingesting it.

That leads me to the infamous and tragic story of the Radium Girls of the U.S. Radium Corporation and the Radium Dial Company. These young women workers in the 1920s painted things with glow-in-the-dark paint. It contained radium. While these salts are only mildly radioactive, the ladies were told to lick the brushes to get a fine tip. Thus they ingested the stuff and were poisoned. Hundreds were sickened, dozens died. The companies finally had to pay up a decade later.

Here’s the thing—the executives knew radium was toxic but kept quiet about it, then claimed ignorance when confronted later with their perfidy. Sadly, scheming corporate scumbags who put profit over people are still with us.

Check out Kate Moore’s 2017 The Radium Girls or Claudia Clark’s 2000 Radium Girls (UNC Press).

I read a lot of books. Mostly novels, both contemporary and vintage. Sometimes a book really stands out. This novel, Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde, is one of the best I’ve read in a long time.

It’s science fiction, or more precisely “cli-fi” or climate fiction. This is a big topic these days as you can imagine. These novels are usually called “dystopian” and you could say that about Eleutheria but it is also hopeful, and surprisingly upbeat. You can also read it as a coming-of-age tale.

The ending might be the best part. It has many possibilities, but it’s also a resolution for our unique protagonist. Eleutheria checks in at a relatively economical 322 pages which is a relief from the flood of overlong modern books. I feel like I could chop 100 pages off of most of today’s novels (and half an hour off most of today’s movies!) without hurting them. Not so this book. Hyde doesn’t waste words and doesn’t waste your time with diversions and self-indulgent blather.

I think you should go out and get this book and give it a read and then tell your friends to do the same. By the way, “Eleutheria” is an island in the Bahamas and is pronounced “Eh-LOO-thuh-ruh.” It’s also the name of a play by Samuel Beckett. It’s a Greek word (ἐλευθερία) that means “liberty.”

There’s a big push to electrify our vehicle fleet. That’s going to require a lot of copper. The folks over at the IEF (International Energy Forum) took a look at this problem. Here’s what they came up with:

The researchers found that between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all human history until 2018 just to meet “business as usual.” This would meet our current copper needs and support the developing world without considering the green energy transition. (from mining.com)

The IEF report went on to say:

To meet the copper needs of electrifying the global vehicle fleet, as many as six new large copper mines must be brought online annually over the next several decades. (from mining.com)

“Annually” means every year. Six new copper mines PER YEAR! Right now it takes about twenty years to bring a copper mine on-line.

The study suggests that hybrid vehicles are a better policy choice than EVs. Copper is too important elswhere:

The researcher (Adam Simon, co-author*) also points out that copper will be needed for developing countries to build infrastructure, such as building an electric grid for the approximately 1 billion people who don’t yet have access to electricity; to provide clean water drinking facilities for the approximately 2 billion people who don’t have access to clean water; and wastewater treatment for the 4 billion people who don’t have access to sanitation facilities.

That’s a lot of people who have very basic needs that we take for granted. Here’s a couple of graphs that illustrate the point:

Every choice is a trade-off. Electrifying our vehicle fleet AND raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people probably isn’t possible. My next car is going to be a hybrid.

*https://lsa.umich.edu/earth/people/faculty/simonac.html

The folks who study this stuff tell us that the element Helium makes up about one-fourth of the universe. Helium is produced in the sun and other stars as a product of nuclear fusion, hence its abundance. Funny thing, it’s scarce here on the home planet.

Terrestrial helium is a product of nuclear decay. Naturally-occurring uranium emits alpha particles which are helium nuclei (two protons and two neutrons).

The alpha particles pick up stray electrons from the environment and the stable helium atoms formed are trapped in rocks underground along with other naturally-occurring gases like hydrocarbons. Much of this helium, if it escapes to the atmosphere, is lost to space. Its heavier sister element, the noble gas Neon, is about three times more abundant (18.18 ppm to 5.24 ppm) in the atmosphere. The earth’s magnetic field is responsible for trapping our life-giving gases (nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor) at the surface.

Helium is very important commercially. Here’s a breakdown of its uses:

The federal government used to stockpile helium as a strategic material. They got out of that business. Helium is extracted from natural gas and thus its production is dependent on that industry. That’s put a dent in supply and raised prices. Laboratories have been hit the hardest. Most of us know something about inert-gas welding, but few of us think about medical applications like MRIs.

It might not be a bad idea for the government to think about stockpiling a strategic reserve again. It doesn’t seem smart to rely on the ups-and-down of a poorly-established and constrained market for such a rare but critical industrial material. A non-renewable resource, I should add. I suppose privatization is the politico-cultural zeitgeist, and I’m stuck in an out-dated interventionist mind-set, but here we are. Regardless, stop buying those stupid helium balloons.