Posted on 03/19/2025 8:12:02 PM PDT by crz
In short, science has discovered a way to burn the coal without paying the toll.
Sorry. Can't help it.
Look figure the cost of refining and recovery of the ash rare earth minerals if they can get them from Ukraine cheaper. Screw the coal ash. It’s the same as recovering uranium from spent nuclear fuel. It cheaper to dig it than refine it. It’s the money pard EOS
With AI available as an engineering assistant, a whole new hobby of turning e-car waste into fun erector-set style vehicles will probably be soon developing: bouncing motorcycles, go-karts, dune buggies, unique ATVs, elevators in strange places, electric plastic bottle pontoon fishing boats, on and on. It's going to be a fun time to be a kid again.
I hope so. But i suspect it will be like electronic waste where they ban sales of used computers, and then collect them for “recycling” in the third world.
Yup. Slag is the crap, that floats to the top when refining iron ore, bauxite, copper, etc.
Good news. Which means the dems will find something wrong with it.
The piles used to be all over Scranton, they were all removed 25 or more years ago.
Magnets are the largest individual user of REE 44%, but EVs are a small.fraction of what those magnets go in 12% of the global REE containing perm mags go in EVs the rest are used in things like MRI, hard drives, aircraft servos,a slew of consumer products.
If you have a battery powered electric device like a drill or a blower or trimmer they all have perm mag motors. Large HVAC units with variable speed compressors all have VFD driven perm mag motors in them. My two heat pumps both have VFD driven perm mag motors as well. It’s the only real way to get variable speeds out of fixed frequency AC current.You have to use a variable frequency drive pushing triple phase too a perm mags async motor.
This means every other industrial process that needs variable speeds and/or soft start up used VFDs and REE containing perm mag motors. Toilet paper is a huge user of these types of drives as soft start is critical to not ripping the bulk paper rolls to make individual rolls.
Industrial REE perm mag motors dwarf EV use by mass and volumes.
https://qz.com/tesla-s-plans-for-rare-earths-free-evs-will-barely-dent-1850183349
“Look figure the cost of refining and recovery of the ash rare earth minerals if they can get them from Ukraine cheaper. Screw the coal ash. It’s the same as recovering uranium from spent nuclear fuel. It cheaper to dig it than refine”
This is the case with all minerals , in the mine new vs recover,recycle,reuse economic calculus.
Price for RRR must be equal or less than mining and processing new ore. Only government mandate or embargo can shift the equation if there is a price difference. There will always be a breakeven price for RRR it is the price where the recovered element is equal to the price of the mined,refined and processed element.
For uranium this is in the $300 per pound range that’s where reprocessing spent fuel by the cheapest known process would equal mined uranium at a spot price of 300 per lb. Since the spot price of yellow cake is $65 today there is no economic incentive to reprocess for PWR/BWR reactors. Dry cask storage is safe and cheap use that until the spot price comes up due to resource depletion.
That said fast spectrum reactors need PU239 for fuel reprocessing is how you get that. Since a fast spectrum reactor will yield 100 times as much energy per lb of uranium vs a PWR you can endure much higher fuel costs for the same LCOE output. PU239 is worth $10000 or more PER GRAM so with fast spectrum reactors it suddenly makes sense to process spent PWR fuel for that PU and then after a 20 year burn cycle in the fast spectrum reactor REprocess its spent fuel to recover more PU than you started with thus spawning a chain of fast reactors.
With a 1.3 breed ratio each fuel cycle yields 30% more PU than you started with. 20 year cycles don’t make sense then. 18 month cycles do. A fast spectrum reactor can do both its all in how you manage the fuel enrichment vs depleted uranium blanket vs steel reflector if no blanket/s actual and or radial too.
With 18 month cycles you only need 4 cycles to spawn a whole new reactors worth of PU fuel. That means every 6 years you double your reactor fleet PU output and power output. This alone should show why fast spectrum reactors are the future of ebrgy. Once humans unlocked the atom it is mind numbingly stupid to use anything else for bulk base load power.
No, that would be bottom ash and economizer ash. Fly ash is the dry ash filtered in the electro-static precipitator and dry vacuumed in to a large hopper to be collected. This dry fly ash is an additive to concrete and other processes.
The slurried ashes can be used as bases for roads or foundations.
Coal is a rather good source of uranium too. Some coal ash is 500ppm with fast spectrum reactors there is more energy in that uranium than was in the coal you burnt.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0360544277900433
Even at 100ppm that’s more than the 3 ppb seawater has. You could leech the uranium into alkaline or acidic freshwater then ask th Chinese for their new super effective carbon fiber membrane to grab down to single part per billion levels out of that fluid. Directly into yellow cake uranium at that. No one else has done this they beat the world leader by double recovery rates in half the time from seawater, From 500ppm its orders of magnitude better. 7.4 grams per gram of fiber that’s literally piling on it they show images of the fiber coated with heaps of yellow cake truly impressive.
“We also tested the electrochemical U removal under the high initial U concentration of 500 ppm. The removal capacity was 7450.9 mg g–1, and this value was better than most of the materials reported so far”
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.3c01291
Coal ash, phosphate mine tailings, solution mining of geothermal energy brines, outright weak acid solution mining of granite rocks all comes to play when you can get at single digit part per billion levels of concentration in less than a months time span. I don’t think people appreciate how fundamental of a breakthrough they made. There is 40 trillion tonnes of uranium in granite rocks in just the upper few km of the granitic crust which as a whole is average 8 ppm uranium...all of it with the range 4 to 34 ppm. When you can get at ppb levels the while planets crust is uranium ore then. Water plus acid plus warm rocks comes back loaded with uranium send water and slightly more acid back down loop till blue in the face.
This says most rare earths are used in catalysts, including in batteries.
https://geology.com/articles/rare-earth-elements/
The Canadian government has 2022 numbers I would trust those over some commercial geology site.
It’s Nd Neodymium the mass of the magnets themselves is REE specifically Nd. Catalysts contain atom scale coatings and a gram or less per catalyst. Otherwise your catalytic converter would be ten grand not 2,000 just in REE costs alone.
Perm mags are Nd based for now and NdFeB magnets containing about 30% REEs by mass. This added up quick when you have industrial motors in the 200kg weight range. A Tesla motor uses 520 grams worth half a kilo. The next gen Tesla motors will use zero they are moving to pure induction motors and aluminum ion cells that use zero REE as well.
https://energycentral.com/system/files/ece/nodes/661370/ev_motors_without_rare_earth_elements.pdf
This company is in Round Rock ,Texas less than 10 miles from the Tesla Gigafactory you can easily figure out why. Their induction motors are half the weight, 98% efficient across wide speeds, use no REE and 66% less copper than existing Async motors. The industrial applications alone male them a huge market player, Tesla is just a feather in the hat. Texans specifically UT Austin spin off Texans leading the way yet again. The lithium ion battery was invented by Dr Goodenough from UT he won the Nobel Prize for it later in life.
https://goinfinitum.com/technology-overview/
Here ya go - an antidote to the Gator harassment.
To: TexasGator
Do you have to be an ass every day?
84 posted on 9/26/2015, 6:24:20 PM by Jim Robinson
https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3341298/posts?page=84#84
They wonder why they cant get their funding drives done like they used to.
If i want a valid honest discussion, i go someplace else. More secure for one thing.
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