Reminds me of my favorite story from the Manhattan project: The project needed massive amounts of wire for all the equipment, but copper was in short supply for the war effort. They ended up working out a deal with the Treasury Department to use silver instead, since it was an even better conductor & apparently more available at the time. Part of the deal involved making sure not to lose any silver & IIRC they managed to not only return all the borrowed silver, they even found some extra to return by tearing up the floors in all the mints, warehouses & workshops, to incinerate & reclaim the precious metal, just like in the article!
Another fun Manhattan fact: They needed a code name for plutonium, so they called it "copper", but what was a poor scientist or engineer who needed to use actual copper to do? The official code name for copper was "Honest-to-God copper".
I am intrigued at how much thought went into "copper". Was the thinking that everyone's eyes would glaze over at such a common material? My initial reaction would be to use a different rare element. However, a rare element might draw more scrutiny to the casual observer. Then again, the potential for confusion is incredibly high. Interesting spycraft.
Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.
Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...
There is a story to go with that story. The colonel responsible for the negotiations with the Treasury would later recall:
> He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied, "6000 tons."
> "How many troy ounces is that?" he asked. In fact, I did not know how to convert troy ounces to tons, and neither did he. A little impatient, I responded, "I don't know how many troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6000 tons - that is a definite quantity. What difference does it matter how we express the quantity?"
> He replied rather indignantly, "Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces."
I did my jewellery trade in Australia (hence the correct spelling for me). We used to keep all our emery paper, old polishing wheels etc and send them off ever few years to be burnt & refined.
When the building we were in got renovated some enterprising guys in another workshop ripped up their floor boards and their neighbouring empty suites and got all the precious metals out of the gaps between the floorboards.
The building was 11 stories and was predominantly filled with small jewellery workshops with 2-5 people per business. And a lot of adjacent businesses (trade supplies, stone merchants etc).
Wandering off topic here, but fans of Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) may remember Emil Minty as The Feral Kid. He only had a few other roles as a child actor, then went on to become a professional jeweler. According to one podcast, he was already fashioning necklaces out of the tabs from discarded cans on set. In the end, a far healthier career choice than many other child actors of the same era.
A friend of mine had an art studio at the Nicholas Building, and I got to speak with a jeweller who told me that he still did a lot of bespoke work in wedding rings, especially for tradies who would otherwise wear down store-bought rings because they were solid gold and therefore softer. I don't remember the details, but he specialised in harder alloys that are nevertheless mostly gold, and therefore "good as gold" for a wedding ring.
> In March, 2022 video creator Klesh, who sells the paydirt he recovers from various areas, ...
Person, who makes money off people believing they can find treasure, makes video about how easy it is to find treasure. "Oh btw you can buy these utils for 25$ in my store."
Media literacy says : trust level 2/10, most probably lies and marketing
Saw it in Karachi last year: a street containing exclusively gold workshops was blocked for traffic Sunday morning, guarded officially by the police, while the staff hired by the co-op swept every inch. Apparently this is a weekly routine.
I'm wondering how these gemstones even make their way on the street. Are jewelry workshops really so messy and flippant with this product that it presumably gets caught up on people and just falls off their clothes when they leave from work? Is it from crappy stone settings falling off immediately on leaving the stores? Seems so strange to me how such a valuable product ends up dispersed in the environment like this.
I wonder how much precious metal such as gold and semiprecious metal such as gallium and indium essentially disappears forever in the thousands of tons of electronic waste every year. Does anyone know the percentages recovered/lost?
Right, some recovery does occur—gold from edge/contact connectors etc. but I'd venture it's only a small fraction of what is used annually. And what about LEDs and transistors? I wonder if anyone ever bothers to recover the gallium and indium from them or whether the amount used isn't worth the effort.
There's discussion about mining landfills to recover these kinds of materials. When you rememeber we had to dig it all out of the ground, taking it from a dump seems pretty convenient!
It mostly ends up in landfill. At some point we may be resource poor, and but energy rich and we'll use Plasma mass separation to separate each element out and reuse the valuable ones. Until then it's safely stored there.
No doubt most valuable elements do end up in landfill and most will ultimately be recovered, but we still need to have a good handle of what's actually lost or doesn't make it there, and or how much leaches out before recovery. (Here we don't seem to have decent figures, if anyone knows of any authoritative references please post them.)
Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).
Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.
That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.
For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).
No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.
__
† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.
I watch this channel a lot. He has a few where he is refining electronic waste. He usually says that is not really worth it due to the time it takes him to do it and small amounts he gets and can get easily lost in the different stages of extraction. Most of the stuff he does is estate sales and melting down that.
I love this guy's channel! It's interesting, unpretentious, and he has such a wealth of chemical and metallurgical knowledge. The reactions and processes he shows are amazing.
Readit News
Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.
Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...
> He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied, "6000 tons."
> "How many troy ounces is that?" he asked. In fact, I did not know how to convert troy ounces to tons, and neither did he. A little impatient, I responded, "I don't know how many troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6000 tons - that is a definite quantity. What difference does it matter how we express the quantity?"
> He replied rather indignantly, "Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces."
6000 metric tons of silver is approximately 192,904,200 troy ounces, and 6000 US tons of silver is approximately 175,000,000 troy ounces.
I'm finding "The Manhattan Project: the Important Role Silver Played In the Building of the Atomic Bomb" <https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Manhattan-Projec...> (2015).
Groves' deputy, Nichols, who was responsible for the loan, also told the story in more detail in 1987 memoir, "The Road to Trinity."
When the building we were in got renovated some enterprising guys in another workshop ripped up their floor boards and their neighbouring empty suites and got all the precious metals out of the gaps between the floorboards.
The building was 11 stories and was predominantly filled with small jewellery workshops with 2-5 people per business. And a lot of adjacent businesses (trade supplies, stone merchants etc).
Would that be your partner?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/22/new-york...
https://www.igi.org/digging-for-gold-in-new-yorks-sidewalks/
Person, who makes money off people believing they can find treasure, makes video about how easy it is to find treasure. "Oh btw you can buy these utils for 25$ in my store."
Media literacy says : trust level 2/10, most probably lies and marketing
https://nypost.com/2011/06/20/got-his-mined-in-the-gutter/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfrqUNFtM6A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5GPWJPLcHg
I call marketing stunt. Most unlikely not a truthful representation of what to expect when doing it yourself.
Right, some recovery does occur—gold from edge/contact connectors etc. but I'd venture it's only a small fraction of what is used annually. And what about LEDs and transistors? I wonder if anyone ever bothers to recover the gallium and indium from them or whether the amount used isn't worth the effort.
Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).
Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.
That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.
For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).
No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.
__
† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePEwr-VxqXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKGhmt7jgMg
Or just get sheet vinyl or something.
A vinyl sheet will just lose it to people's boots.
10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day. So he might be happy to make the trade-off for having a nice carpet.
Wiktionary: From Middle English lymail, from Anglo-Norman limaille, from Latin limare, a form of limo (“to file”); see further there.