It’s been a trope of the news cycle over the past decade or so, that there’s some element which we all need but which someone else has the sole supply, and that’s a Bad Thing. It’s been variously lithium, or rare earth elements, and the someone else is usually China, which makes the perfect mix of ingredients for a good media scare story. Sometimes these things cross from the financial pages to the geopolitical stage, even at times being cited in bellicose language. But is there really a shortage?
The Colorado School of Mines say perhaps not, as they’ve released a paper from an American perspective pointing out that the USA already has everything it needs but perhaps doesn’t realize it. We’re surprised it seems to have passed unnoticed in a world preoccupied with such matters.
We’ve covered a few stories about mineral shortages ourselves, and some of them even point to the same conclusion reached by the School of Mines, that those mineral riches lie not in the mines of China but in the waste products closer to American industry. In particular they point to the tailings from existing mines, a waste product of which there is a huge quantity to hand, and which once stripped of the metal they were mined for still contain enough of the sought-after ones to more than satisfy need.
The history of mining from medieval lead miners processing Roman tailings to 19th century gold miners discovering that their tailings were silver ore and on to the present day, includes many similar stories. Perhaps the real story is economic both in the publicity side and the mining side, a good scare story sells papers, and it’s just cheaper to buy your molybdenum from China rather than make your own. We’ll keep you posted if we see news of a tailings bonanza in the Rockies.
The stories are a wake up call, or an attempt at least, to point out that you shouldn’t lean on foreign powers such as China for your basic sustenance.
One of the reasons why such basic resources aren’t sourced at home is that it allows people to push away the responsibility of the outcomes and pretend they don’t exist – such as mining for rare earth minerals which means dealing with radioactive waste as side products. These mines were protested against, the companies harassed, litigated, or outright banned in the west because of environmentalist pressures, but the need for the materials didn’t go away so the problems were outsourced to… guess where.
And one of the reasons why China IS cheaper is that if the process was implemented in the west, “little green men” would instantly pop up and demand measures to control the contamination that would make the process uneconomical.
Measures which then do not take place when the materials are sourced cheaper from China, because they don’t care. They have vast areas of land populated by people they don’t care about, or at least the administration doesn’t, which means you end up with literal mountains of radioactive soil, or rivers and fields polluted by silicon tetrachloride and the ozone layer getting damaged from banned-in-west solvents due to westerners pretending to be “green” by buying imported solar panels.
The administration cares deeply about those people! They’re the forced labour – ah, sorry, re-education – for the mines.
You bring up a point that, while probably valid, is incorrectly attributed to the article. Please show me where the hackaday article or the referenced article mention “leaning on foreign powers such as China…”. Nothing I read (besides maybe this: “The benefits of enhanced recovery are not only economic and geopolitical but also environmental”) sounds like a “wake-up call”, or even an attempt. You’re reading your own preconceptions and opinions into the source. (Also, I don’t think yttrium or cobalt can be classified as “basic sustenance”).
No, that was my comment on the point of the stories, not attributed to the article.
Insofar as you want television screens and high strength steel as a basic element of modern society, they are.
Or electric cars, motors, and batteries (cobalt).
None of which qualify as “sustenance”.
We had electric cars in the early 1900s, though? Same with high-strength steel, and televisions (to an extent). Believing that rare earths are necessary just means you’ve fallen for industry propaganda. With a modest efficiency hit, you can make technology work with far more limited materials than what we have access to today.
Letting industry guide foreign policy is a failure of leadership. Someone needs to tell these people “no”.
Well, we could go back to earlier technologies to run our societies, and abandon goals like getting rid of the internal combustion engine, but if that’s your answer then others might disagree.
Hardly useful in the broader scheme of things, and we had cobalt back then. Cobalt is used in “high-speed steel”, which is used for making machining tools, or tool steel in general.
The development of hard-wearing strong magnets in the modern sense started with cobalt-samarium in the 1960’s. It’s the reason why we got high fidelity audio devices, miniaturized electric motors, smaller computer hard drives etc. Then we transitioned to neodymium magnets, which carry the same supply problems as cobalt does – that it comes mainly from China.
Yes, tube televisions. Although yttrium was used in those as well, since it’s part of the phosphor coatings that emit light at the tube surface. Likewise, it’s part of the LED lights we use instead of the now-banned incandescent tubes. Fluorescent tubes also use it. Though if you’re thinking about reviving the halogen bulb, guess who produces the most Tungsten? That’s right: China – by a vast margin.
If you give up on yttrium, you would have to go quite a way back in time and technology. Not just a “a modest efficiency hit”.
The point of China in all of this is to produce everything that everyone needs at such low prices, regardless of the cost to themselves and their own people or environment, that other countries would lose the market, the infrastructure and the know-how, to replace China as a supplier – which would then give them the leverage to raise prices and demand (geo)political concessions any way they want.
It’s an economic war of attrition.
@Dude
You genuinely don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You don’t need rare earths or cobalt for “high fidelity audio devices”; you made that up. Speaker cones (being paper) contain no rare earths, and an electromagnet (made of iron and copper) can produce the exact same field as a permanent magnet.
Same goes for tool steel. There are plenty of alloys (that I myself use!) which contain no cobalt whatsoever, and they cut steel just fine. Resharpening a drill after 90 holes instead of 100 holes is really not a big deal.
Likewise for yttrium (of all elements, why yttrium?). There are plenty of other ways to get a red subpixel on your TV, and if for some reason those are too difficult, we can just use amber instead. It’s not far off. And while we’re talking about vacuum tubes, even tungsten can be replaced! Tantalum, osmium, and even carbon can do the same thing!
I don’t know where this mentality comes from, where a lack of ingenuity causes one to despair so thoroughly that they crawl back to reinforcing the status quo, but it needs to end! Be capable! Be creative!
The main use of magnets in hifi is in speakers. Those magnets are mostly ferrites which are weak magnets, chosen for their cheapness. Ferrites are iron oxide ceramics with other metals added to enhance properties.
Lotta people here seem to be missing the fact that “sustenance” is a fancy word for food. As noted, rare earth minerals do not count as food :p
A lot of commenters seem to fail to realise that marginal cost for getting fossil fuels gets higher and higher every year. Meaning that it is required to spend more and more energy per one barrel pumped.
Meanwhile societies get more and more complex every year. More complex meaning requiring more and more energy to handle bookkeeping and tracking everything.
And when things don’t match, societies have historically collapsed. Meaning rapid change to less complex society. If that happens with old technology being used, odds are pretty high that humankind is never going to be able to achieve current level of progress ever again.
It’s crazy that such common sense ideas have been twisted and their denial justified through diverging ideological lenses in the past thirty years. Of course actual, concrete industrial production is better than a nation of 300 million email/zoom or doordash jobs. Of course we should make our own stuff instead of outsourcing it. Of course that was all done for selfish and myopic reasons. Of course it’s eventually going to destroy us if we can’t reel it in. And of course we should prioritize our own people, whom we have the power to help, instead of pretending we’re perfect universalists with magically equal responsibility and power owed to every single being in the universe.
Anybody should be able to admit these things, but about half can’t. Or they’ll refuse to face it head-on and instead deflect into trite “it’s the corporations, maaaaan” cliches, which feel satisfying to say, but in reality they paralyze any possible action here and now.
I believe there are some people who are “too good”, who have to adhere to universalist principles no matter how contrived or counter-productive because they cannot handle the idea that nothing fundamentally demands us to be good to everybody. The fact that we try is about being good to others in order for others to be good to us – a fundamentally selfish instrumental motive, not a moral law of nature. In doing so, in a twisted sense of irony, they end up hurting everybody.
They become absolute pacifists, or animal rights activists, environmentalists, etc. because through too much empathy, the idea of some other being hurt is the same as themselves being hurt. Any injustice to the other is injustice to the self, and the failure to act on it, and the failure of others to care as much, turns into frustration and anger, and blame projected onto the society around.
So it becomes good to throw a million of “us privileged” under the bus, or even just one, except you personally of course; to demand sacrifices from others to save one starving child in Africa, because we are collectively guilty of ignoring your sensibilities. When many such people come to exercise social power together, it becomes a plague of saints.
Wow, show us on the doll where altruism touched you… Can’t contemplate a world where people actually care about others? That’s a limitation of your own perspective, not the indictment of religion you think it is.
Your blood, brain, balls and broccoli are all full of microplastics but it’s those myopic environmentalists who are harming everyone.
Lets not forget about what might be one of our greatest resource. Land fills.
Between electronic wastes, plastics and biomass, we have the fule and elements for a revolution
Isn’t is sad that there are things stopping America somewhat from walking all over everybody in the rest of the world like they would like to. – say only Americans (and the insane).
Lots of sources, no willingness to accept the mess inherent in processing it.
It will end up somewhere poor, but outside China’s control.
I’d hope, multiple places.
Tucson Arizona?
Gary Indiana?
Troy NewYork?
East St Louis Illinois?
All shitholes that would be improved by jobs.
Also
Decatur Illinois.
Which already has jobs, but needs something to cut the smell.
Whole town smells like tofu eater has puked in all 4 corners of room.
I digress.
It’s unlikely that it will be anywhere within the US. Just because someone lives in Marin County California, it doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t going to try and stop all mining or processing that happens anywhere in Arizona or Indiana. The Sierra Club tries to stop green even energy projects nationwide, and has no tolerance for mining.
The Sierra Club is an interesting piece of work. They oppose coal, nuclear, hydro, oil, gas… and when renewable energy projects were proposed they realized that it would transform vast areas into industrial wind or solar farms – so they started opposing those too, even on agricultural land that wasn’t wilderness. They also oppose housing projects and urban expansion, yet they’ve turned their coats on immigration and population growth under pressure from other progressive groups to not seem racist.
It’s a “build nothing nowhere never” club that seems to have no proper solutions to anything.
Only people who have never been to Tucson would consider Tucson a shithole.
9 out of 10 junkies agree!
phoenix was a shithole last time i was there. used to be nice at one point. i can only imagine how run down tuscon is, though i dont think ive ever been there.
Is “tofu eater” some kind of racist epithet?
I’d assume it means a vegan?, so no, veganism isn’t a racial group.
No.
It’s a small city where 90% of American Soy beans are processed by ADM.
It literally smells like a tofu eater puked in the corner of every room in the city.
Gross! Glad I haven’t driven through there
When the wind is just wrong, they can smell Decatur in Chicago or St Louis.
One of the reasons I don’t grow mung beans. I’ll sprout some root microgreens on my own but eff that smell.
If you have multiple reasons to not grow mung beans there is something wrong with you.
“I don’t want to” usually suffices for most purposes.
at the moment, who gets the profits from mining and production is more important than the production itself
Or from buying and selling – someone has to handle the logistics.
That’s the modern way: you make money not by producing or refining stuff, but by placing yourself in the middle of the value chain as a “service”. The longer you make the value chain from the producer to the consumer, the more extra steps you demand, the more opportunities you have to extract money from the middle.
Are you living in 1960?
Many fortunes have been made by ‘cutting out the middleman’ since.
The chain is generally longer, but I’d bet fewer hands by far.
A longer chain literally means there’s more middle steps – which means more middle-men.
Though they might be in the hands of the same corporation, I admit, but that sort of “vertical integration” hasn’t been in vogue for a long time.
Though in terms of the service economy proper, the chain tends to grow longer at the other end.
In simple terms, think of “coffee as a service”. Instead of you buying beans from the closest supply in bulk, you have an intermediate company that that grinds and packages it up to sell it to you. Except, they sell it to a distributor that serves a retail chain which sells it to you. This would be the point where we were at 50 years ago. You buy coffee from the supermarket and brew it yourself.
Except, the distributor sells it to a vendor who brews the coffee and then sells it to you. Alright, we’re getting into Starbucks territory. Except, they sell it to a delivery business that brings coffee to your front door or office as a service. Now we’re starting to grow the service chain.
The delivery business sells the service to a business that sells subscriptions to bring you coffee. Except, they sell the subscription service through an online platform that offers you choice among different delivery services including coffee, fast food, other deliverables…
Each step adds cost by having another layer of business with expenses, taxes and wages paid. What’s the next level? I don’t know, but I’m sure they’ll invent it and ask money for it. That then demands that the original price of coffee beans must go down, or the price becomes unaffordable to the end consumer, which means coffee cannot be obtained unless the original producer is making it at dirt-cheap prices under slave-like conditions in some developing country.
When people no longer have jobs in basic production and industry, this is what they come up with instead.
Plus the jobs in media, content producers, and advertisers, and agencies who produce the adverts, who try to convince you that you must subscribe to coffee as a service instead of just buying the damn coffee beans and brewing it yourself, which also reflects in the cost of doing business through these intermediaries, which you end up paying,
And that is the meaning of the service economy. From producer to consumer, add as many steps and middle-men as possible to dig into the value of any basic commodity or fundamental service that consumers desire, and convince consumers that this is the “right price” that they should be paying.
100% – excellent posts! Explain the parasites in the shortest paragraphs possible.
Parasites are literally what they sound like, entities that do NOT add value to the product, but need long distribution chain.
Parasites like mosquitoes do serve some role in the ecosystems – they provide food for lacewings, dragonflies/damselflies, bats, etc etc. Not very useful to humans for sure, but they exist nonetheless. Similarly, endless chains of hidden entities, suck the value out, but there are other entities feeding off them, hence, they are needed (though, not by the average Sam who’s paying $10 per bag of ground coffee instead of the nominal ~$4 it costs to make, bag and ship).
BTW, unrelated, but related – years and years back I was doing research on the lower limit of sustainable petrol (oil in the US) pricing, obviously, not WTI Crude, the Brent Crude. My calculations came between $25 and $35 per barrel. Local. US drill/refine/deliver, not overseas shipped-just-in-time. The trouble was, most of it was locked inside Permian Basin, inside closed wells, some with their pumpjacks attached, but stopped. The issue was with the owners selling the rights to drill to the networks. Same difference. Reselling the drill rights to the highest bidder who usually happens to be the oil-making companies under gazillion different names. It is as if a cartel keeps those competing pumpjacks turned off so they can sell their stuffs. Crafty imitation of a free market, because why would one sell drilling rights to the lowest bidder, right?
Kinda makes me think there is similar broken “free market” with the average Sam;s car (and parts), and it is not the unions or their workers who cause average “cheap” car in the US sold for no less than $28K (usually more because dealers’ jackup plus sales tax plus all kinds of hidden gotchas – say, delivery fee? I HAVE to pay for the car delivered to the dealer? Why I can’t drive to the factory and pick it myself? Also, just WHY can’t I ORDER car at the same factory myself? What value dealer adds?) Since average car dealer NEVER has the car I need sold for the price I can afford, then what is it they we have – planned profits socialism for the car dealers?
Length in miles is not going to correlate directly (or at all) with length in ownership steps.
JIT delivery and direct ordering has drastically reduced the need for middlemen/warehousing.
Durable goods retail comes direct from the manufacturer in the 21st century.
If the retail step isn’t a manufacturer web site.
Who buys coffee as a service?
You’re hanging your argument on a tiny market.
What % of coffee do you think is ‘coffee as a service’?
I doubt it’s 1%, in the densest city core.
Even if doing math in $.
Closest you’ll find in a big market is stupid K-cups and Charbucks.
Still bet there is much more old school home/office drip than Kurig or all coffee shops.
I will admit I live in a bubble of French press vs espresso and green beans direct from farmer coop for cheap.
I know some people that drink Starbucks, but I think less of them because of it.
Enough about coffee.
It doesn’t support your argument.
Also: Look at who’s agreeing with you ^^^^^
Remember the Henry Rollins method of checking your thinking…
I bet Morrisey and Gee agree with you.
Sure sign you are wrong.
this is also why health care costs so much. they have placed so many bureaucrats in the works that its impossible to get anything done. you can make money cutting out the middle man yes. but others are hellbent to add more. its great for the middle men. thats why so many government agencies are staffed by the friends of congressmen im gonna make this 3 letter agency so you can consume the entire budget every year while the reason the agency exists (how it was sold to the public) gets scraps.
see spotify and accompanied organisations…
This is kind of misrepresenting the issue here.
The problem isn’t that these elements are only found in China or other places, and it never has ever been that.
The problem IS that we do not have the infrastructure to process these kinds of elements from a mine, and setting that up is prohibitively expensive.
Like so many other things that we have outsourced, the cost differential is orders of magnitude at this point, and it makes no sense to consider opening up these kinds of industries in the US, even if one considers new tariffs, etc into the cost.
The correct time to do this was the 1980s, but corporations wanted to maximize their profits, and outsourcing the US’s industrial infrastructure was fair game to them. They could lower their prices and make a higher profit margin. Child labor is cheap. And they are children very far away were our consumers can’t see them.
The rise of Private Equity has strip mined our economy and we have little left. We don’t even have Sears anymore. Please look into that if you don’t know the history of Sears and the man who destroyed a profitable company because it was easier and quicker to turn it into a fire sale.
It’s almost like critical industries shouldn’t be left to the whim of the free market, or something. China understands this at least, even if we don’t.
It’s not a free market. All these Chinese industries are state owned, in practice if not officially, and their government subsidises their exports, and clears up their mess (with PR, by arresting journalists, not actually clearing it up), and provides ethnic and religious minorities who need “re-education” or “deradicalisation” to work as slave labour.
Wow you extremely missed the point
Not really. The free market can be broken by powerful actors like a country and a state which does not play by the rules of free market and throws it around by its sheer size.
The solution is not to abandon the free market and play the same command economy game, but to exclude the offending player.
“but to exclude the offending player”
After all, that’s why we have rules like anti-trust laws to stop powerful entities from taking over and turning a free market into a non-free market.
The command economy game seems to work really well, though. And if it’s capable of breaking our game (while we can’t do the same in return), isn’t it just better? Doesn’t that mean we lost?
Anon:
What nation do you claim is doing ‘really well’ with a command economy?
China?
The one on the brink of financial collapse?
Bubbles everywhere?
Broken banking system?
People paying mortgages on bits of abandoned construction sites?
The problem with command economies is they get shit wrong.
Are run by people at their level of incompetence, who refuse to correct.
For example, China recently built out car production for the world, expecting to dominate, especially electric cars.
They are currently dumping cars below cost to any nation foolish enough to allow it.
They will fail, the cars are junk.
It would only work if they could accomplish it in less time then it becomes apparent the cars are falling apart.
The other half of the problem is the Chinese car companies are largely owned by children of central committee members, so they aren’t allowed to fail.
Even Russians don’t want Chinese cars anymore, they were among the first outside to get them and are poor enough.
Problem is, they drive like Russians, on Russian roads, tough on cars.
Your statement is an echo of the 1950s and Russia.
Lefties said it then, it was wrong then, it’s wrong now.
‘Inevitably lose’
Let me guess?
You believe in ‘social evolution’ leading us inevitably to communism?
It’s OK to admit it.
Yes, that’s the point! The Chinese know better than to put their national security up for sale. We should be learning from them, not whining when we inevitably lose to them. We should be nationalizing our production capacity so it doesn’t get sold out from under us!
Sears died because it was old and everybody in the hierarchy was operating at their level of incompetence (confidently maintaining exactly 0.10 BAC).
1950 Sears was like Pepsi, they promoted from within, managers HAD to play their ‘executive games’.
Only modern corporation I can think that was similar was ‘Arthur Anderson’, before it shit the bed. Their partner candidates got financially sodomized like few others.
Of course, all metrics are gamed.
In that era metrics lived for decades, hierarchies got filled by generations of metric gamers and things got weird.
Early in my working life, I crossed paths with a ‘Sears alum’.
Empty suit, but ‘executive style hair’.
Constant cigar smoke almost covered scotch smell.
His ‘advice’ on women:
“You have to stalk them! They always say ‘no’ 50 times before you eventually convince them. Be persistent. Show up in their life where they don’t expect it and ask again.”
Sad thing, in his zip code when he was 20, it was true.
Digressing again.
IMHO, Sears started as a printed mail catalog company; it failed to compete with its only worthy competitor, not the other mail catalog companies (Montgomery Ward, JC Penney, Macy’s, etc), but the largest mail/online catalog on Earth, internet. In very real sense, it could not compete with its own business model that moved away from the printed catalog.
Because it was old, it’s management was operating at their level of incompetence.
This is not a controversial statement.
Happens to all hierarchical organizations: companies, governments, militaries, religions, political parties.
The peter principle is an observed fact.
There is room to disagree on why and how but the principle is supported by all the data.
Sears was already doomed when Lampert took over. The right person might have saved the company, but he wasn’t the right person. He sold off the company piecemeal to raise money to keep what was left afloat. There are those those claim he personally profited from the dissolution; I’m in no position to judge the truth of that.
Agree that: “…we do not have the infrastructure to process these kinds of elements from a mine, and setting that up is prohibitively expensive…” because the “entrance fees”, ie, investing in such infrastructure, is so high, it is ONLY possible with the Uncle Sam’s moneys to start with, ie, our taxes (because most corporations pay close to zero taxes).
Makes me think it is high time for all the banksters who sucked in our TARP bailout moneys to now step up to the challenge and invest into such infrastructure. $443.5 billion was given to the US “financial institutions”, now it is time they help out, profit or not, investing into such infrastructure.
But of course, banks are black holes, moneys come in, never come out. Hotel California for greenbucks.
It hasn’t. Its been known for longer than any of us have been alive that rare earths (and lithium) are not rare. The issue has always been the cost of extraction is too high to make it profitable in the US. Because concentrations of whatever mineral-du-jour the press is freaking out about are too diffuse or US regulatory and labor costs make it unprofitable.
China closes off rare earth exports and we could have a new mine and extraction plant opened inside of two years.
Well this is about extraction from something other than mines. Things might work out for the better.
We’ve always known that we have superior deposits of those rare earths. We’ve known that since the 1950s. It isn’t a problem of nobody knowing where to mine them, it’s a problem of a certain lawmaker having a husband who owned a huge number of shares in some Chinese rare earth mine and so she decided to use her power to aggressively shut down American mines for entirely fake and cynical environmental reasons so that her family would make a fortune in insider trading. Which is legal for them, for some reason.
And guess how the Chinese mine’s environmental track record compares to ours? Just absolute and utter betrayal, history is full of these.
If foreigners were allowed direct investment in Chinese companies your fairy tail might almost make sense.
Instead it just sounds like you swallowed the brown stinky pill without question.
“We”, like in US americans?
Even if this page is primarily visited by people living in the usa, I’d have appreciated a more precise title selection.
From over here, “only the US and China have the stuff we need” does not sound a whole lot better then “no one but China has it”.
Both nation’s leader will not hesitate using rare materials as just another lever to twist everyone’s arms into submission with.
If they keep their financial commitments to NATO, in about 20 years Germany will have it’s own aircraft carrier attack group.
If those are clearly obsolete by then, the ‘next big thing’.
Which means France, England and Poland will also have a one or more each, because Germans.
Have you seen Germans dance?
It looks like marching.
The French surrender.
“Making” molybdenum would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Making molybdenum has already been done in many ways. Probably the most common is the breakdown of uranium-235 into molybdenum-99, which has a half-life of 66 hours.
Wall Street simply wants short term profits and doesn’t take into account national interests or long term outcomes. That’s why the basic message of a much longer quote by Lenin is so true: “A capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with” to which I will add, “when corporate owned governments allow that.”
Much of the US problems with respect to mining come from unnecessarily ANAL environmental regulations which is why it’s cheaper to ship ore to China for processing where they don’t care about such things.
Since rare earths aren’t actually rare, here’s an informative conference on what the US could do about mining and processing them, describing in detail why China has a near monopoly, how it ruthlessly maintains it mainly via dumping to destroy foreign startups, and how we could fix that problem:
S. 2093 Rare Earth Cooperative 21st Century Manufacturing Act introduced by Senator Marco Rubio – 29 Aug 2019
S. 2093 is a bill to establish a Thorium-Bearing Rare Earth Refinery Cooperative. Introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, this Senate Staffer briefing shows the legislation being argued in favor by U.S. Army Brigadier General John Adams (Retired), the senior geoscientist Dr. Ned Mamula (USGS, DoE, CIA), James Kennedy (expert on Rare Earths), and Mark Noga who’s spent 25 years sourcing Rare Earths for automotive, medical, aerospace and defense systems.
https://youtu.be/8mO6hZFGnA8
Last status of the bill:
07/11/2019 Read twice and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
The end. Never went anywhere from there.
the only thing that keeps us from having rare earth mines, nuclear power or anything mind you is nimbyism.
The Country should move aggressively to lock down sources and supplies of nimbyism for national security reasons. Our precious nimbyism stores must be protected. Wait, what? Oh, not an element? Nevermind.
I quite like BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
We walked up to Bonanza & Jumbo copper mines in Alaska, the copper mined there was so pure sometimes they didn’t need to run it through any of the purification processes before shipping it to the smelters.
Many decades later some folks came back with the intent of mining what was left because (I forget the exact numbers) even the leftovers were 5-20x richer than what was considered viable by modern standards. For whatever reason that fell through, perhaps there was not enough left to be really viable, but the idea stuck with me – back then they were likely throwing away stuff that would be considered pretty valuable now.
The crummy little town where I spent half my childhood was originally a gold mining town, and the people working the mines had a lot of problems with this thick black mineral that kept contaminating all the gold concentration systems. Finally some bright guy realized oh hey wait that means it’s really heavy and probably also worth something, so he got a whole bunch, did some work on it, and realized that it was a mixed silver lead carbonate, and was worth a lot of money, so he quietly went around and bought up the surface rights to all the enormous tailings piles all over town, and then set up a cupellation refinery that managed to get the silver out, and made an absolutely enormous amount of money sifting tailings.
People still (very rarely) find giant chunks of gold in the tailings piles, that were so big they got sifted out as gangue because the crusher sifters were built with the assumption that the gold would be mostly fines.
Photo, apparently not identified anywhere, is of the Amex-owned Climax molybdenum mine at the top of Fremont Pass, Lake County, Colorado, with Mount Democrat in the background.