Researchers Refine Rare Earth Element Recovery Process
At this moment, the US is dependent almost completely upon China for Rare Earth metals. Rare Earth metals are essential to the production of advanced electronics and military high tech systems. Tethered to the Rare Earths’ production is another industry based on a mineral that is almost always found with Rare Earth metals, Thorium. The somewhat newly born Thorium Molten Salt Reactor visionaries purport that the mining of Rare Earths’ and Thorium, is easy with little of no ecohazard risk. Such is simply not the case. The clean up is so bad and toxic, mainly from the left over chemicals used to extract the metals, that China is attempting to leverage all countries that buy Rare Earths’ from China to contribute to the massive clean up in China needed to protect their environment from the remaining chemical waste from Rare Earth mining.
Within the boarders of the US, the US Government has classified unextracted Thorium and Uranium remaining in Rare Earth tailings as a “Nuclear Source” of potential weapons grade material. The extraction process of Rare Earths alone renders Thorium and Uranium more concentrated than they are naturally. In the US this “source” waste is expensive to manage, as it must be collected, canned and securely stored. This expense is why the US can’t-don’t-won’t mine Rare Earths. But again the mining wastes alone, even without a “source” classification present an extreme ecological danger and are very difficult to store and/or clean up.
In West Virginia, where other metal mining has left many areas devastated with toxic mining tailings, the tailings have been found to have a very high concentration of the most valuable of the Rare Earths. The University of West Virginia is developing a method to retrieve Rare Earth metals from the left over metal mining sludge. See the above video.
So the big question is, is there a way to address the cleanup of mining of both Thorium and Rare Earth Metals effectively, safely and without a huge expense? Perhaps Kirk Sorensen of Flibe Energy and the many other folks promoting Thorium Cycle Molten Salt reactors should get in touch with the guys at WVU. Maybe there is a way to combine Rare Earth and Thorium mining so that the tailings are not so toxic.
The combination of Thorium and of Molten salt and of Rare Earths represent a huge opportunity for a safe and secure future for everyone. We all need Rare Earths for all future electronics and we can use Thorium in a more advanced and safer nuclear reactor that has a zero carbon footprint. America has a near endless supply of Thorium and Rare Earth metals. The list of benefits derived from a Thorium Molten Salt Reactor are near endless.
Getting the people, the government and the investors passionate about Thorium MSRs is altogether a different matter. Americans are the zombie apocalypse of inbred ignorance forever frightened and unable to comprehend, the US Government is bought and sold and has not the spine to mandate big business to address this issue and most of the venture capitalists are science illiterate whores who see little profit in investing in a technology that might save life on Earth.
We have used MSRs for over fifty years and they are truly the closest thing to a reactor that Homer Simpson could run and not kill anyone, including himself. Turn them off and they are walk away safe. Engineers and scientists understanding of reactor safety and criticality excursions has increased over the decades and people’s ability to enlist the assistance of advance computer programing and modeling is a newly applied and powerful tool in designing and operating a nuclear reactor. And Molten salt does not mean salt water, it means no water, no pressure and no steam, no steam explosion, no hydrogen explosion and Cesium 137 is dissolved in the salt not in the air we breathe.
If we can mine the Thorium, if we can employ molten salt reactors for our energy needs, and to produce our medical isotopes, and to burn up existing nuclear wastes, and extract CO2 from the atmosphere we may beat climate catastrophe.
This is our best shot.
It needs to happen now.
- M.H. O’Neal