news6km underwater sounds bad (and it is), but the main bottleneck is still separation and refining.
I would have given a Japanese source directly but anything remotely skeptical is hard-paywalled and the archive sites can't get through. This article from China US Focus heavily cites a paywalled article from Mainichi Shimbun. The tone reads like a hit piece, but after digging around I think the picture is broadly accurate. Japan is many years away from having a commercially viable rare earths supply chain.
More links of interest:
It's a mud layer off the coast of a small Japanese Pacific island.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamitorishima
Japanese survey estimates 16 million tons of heavy REEs and yttrium
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23948-5
General paper on formation and distribution of sea floor REE deposits
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.6c00046
In Minamitorishima mud, REEs are concentrated in "fish bone debris"
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.6c00046
Paper looks at REE-rich mud cores (from elsewhere) and plots contents
- https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1029/2022GC010681
The environmental cost of deep sea mining could be significant
- https://earthjustice.org/article/deep-sea-mining-explained
- https://deep-sea-conservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/DSCC_FactSheet1_DSM_intro_4pp_OCT_23.pdf-2.pdf
- https://www.int-res.com/articles/feature/m712p001.pdf
Just to round out the perspective, these guys think Minamitorishima could be economical, but the paper focuses on the mining and leaching, which are early steps, and not the complex separation and refining infrastructure that China dominates. If even the mining and leaching steps are in question, I think that emphasizes what an uphill battle rare earth self-sufficiency would be for Japan.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/11/3/310
If we expanded the space program instead of blowing up the middle east for warbucks and petroldollar we would be mining asteroids and not worry about scarcity. We would be advancing our way to a tier 1 civilization. It would have been a gradual transition. Nord Stream would never have been blown up. The motivation for the Ukraine, and Iran proxy wars would have been moot. We would be far better off and more peaceful. No endangered ocean life need be disturbed. Probably some bickering over who owns what but at the end of the day once the minerals are back on earth it wouldn't matter.
But we're dredging eons old mineral balls out of despiration.
Isn't astroid mining deorbiting them onto earth? I have some reservations about that.
You can process it in space or da moon. Net it, set up a containment. Robots. Bring back only the good stuff. I am sure if they get refining in space down it might even lead to some better quality material. We would have to develop some tech yes, with 20 trillion+ i am sure we could have done more practical things than genocide.
You can genocide people with astroids. I'm glad Musk or Bezos aren't in control of that.
Fair point given the comic book evil these fuckwads are. Maybe China can beat them to it.
This is what deep see mining will murder.
Any nation that does deep sea mining deserves to be dismantled.
The "20x the going rate" estimate appears to be expert commentary by someone speaking to the media (Yoshikiyo Shimamine speaking to Nikkei, behind a paywall), not a published study. It's so early that there's probably no reliable number or scaling curve or roadmap that anyone can point to. It seems to be vibes at this point.
probably an educated guess padded with a safety factor that would still be a lowball.
and that's just money, not the environmental destruction. we'd be better off killing anyone who tries to mine the seabed
I love the absolute shit-tier AI generated images they put into this. Pathetic display once again, the Media.
Like burning down a rainforest to collect some rocks.
Godzilla needs to take care of this
