Cautious Steps Toward Seabed Mining (maritime-executive.com) 97
mdsolar writes: The deep ocean was once assumed to be lifeless and barren. Today we know that even the deepest waters teem with living creatures, some of them thought to be little changed from when life itself first appeared on the planet. The deep ocean is also essential to the earth's biosphere. It regulates global temperatures, stores carbon, provides habitat for countless species and cycles nutrients for marine food webs. Currently stressed by pollution, industrial fishing, and oil and gas development, these cold, dark waters now face another challenge: mining. With land-based mineral sources in decline, seabeds offer a new and largely untapped frontier for mineral extraction, and companies are gearing up to mine a treasure trove of copper, zinc, gold, manganese, and other minerals from the ocean floor. Scientists, regulators, and mining companies are now collaborating on frameworks and strategies for mining the seabed responsibly. Cindy Van Dover, director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory and chair of the school's Division of Marine Science and Conservation, says that's encouraging, given that seabed mining appears to be inevitable.
Asteroid Mining (Score:3)
That's actually a good point about asteroid mining. This is in many ways similar: An expensive proposition to exploit resources in a harsh environment. Instead of no atmosphere, you have massive pressure. Instead of rockets, you have submarines. Both present major engineering challenges. Both would likely be done largely if not entirely by robots.
Will Space X reduce the cost of space travel to make asteroid mining economical? Do asteroids have mineral resources that are worth exploiting? Will techniq
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:4, Insightful)
I have my doubts that asteroid mining will ever be economical for filling the need for raw materials on Earth. What I think is that asteroid mining will end the need to have to launch anything other than human beings from the surface of the planet. The biggest cost of getting into orbit and beyond is the cost of accelerating large amounts of matter to or beyond 11.2km/s. If you could get all the raw material for your satellites, space stations and space craft from asteroids, process it, refine it and manufacture all of it in space, then you would have a space-based economy that wasn't reliant on Earth for most of its raw materials; including volatiles.
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think, save for the very high value items, the ones you listed (and probably, in time, He3), we won't be using a lot of asteroid minerals on Earth itself.
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Well, if you're going to mine raw materials in space and ship them to Earth, they would need to be high value items rather than bulk commodities. Things like Platinum, Osmium, etc. Iron would likely never make sense.
More likely, we'll be mining asteroids for iron, nickel, etc. for use in space and eventually be left over with a blog of gold and platinum which will probably be worth more to drop in on earth with a cheap heat shield that use in space for industrial purposes.
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...The biggest cost of getting into orbit and beyond is the cost of accelerating large amounts of matter to or beyond 11.2km/s....
No it isn't. It is almost entirely the high cost of spaceflight hardware - an extremely high tech bit of manufacturing, the costliest end of aerospace tech.
Raw materials in space do not make you a vehicle equipped with electronics, intricate propulsion systems, power generation, thermal control, environmental control all of which is ultra-high-reliability (because otherwise you die, or you probe quits working where repairmen are unavailable) in a vacuum subjected to hard UV, space flare radiation, etc. All
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The biggest reason we need to indulge in "an extremely high tech bit of manufacturing" is it costs so damn much to put a kg into orbit. If you could actually manufacture electronics and other hardware in space you could afford much higher defect rates, particularly if you had a large supply of raw materials. Beyond that you wouldn't need to build for high G forces or compactness, or use high tech alloys in an effort to shave off every last bit of mass. You could build hardware designed to be easy to manu
Mining in harsh environments (Score:2)
Will Space X reduce the cost of space travel to make asteroid mining economical?
SpaceX is barely touching the problems for asteroid mining. They're just trying to get the cost to orbit to something manageable which is super important but just a first step in a long journey. They aren't dealing at all the practical problems of actually turning an asteroid into useful materials. There is a lot more to it than just getting into space.
Do asteroids have mineral resources that are worth exploiting?
Almost certainly they have valuable materials. However that doesn't mean they can be exploited economically.
Will techniques for undersea mining prove economical?
We're already doing undersea mining (oil and
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>Do asteroids have mineral resources that are worth exploiting?
I have been assured by people that have walked-on-the-surface-of-the-moon cred that at current prices for rare earth elements a 1km asteroid would have a value of $990 trillion. The thesis was that even if the glut dropped prices by a factor of a hundred you were looking at a shit load of jack.
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I've been assured that asteroid mining and 3D printing have solved all resource problems?
So, wait . . . I have an idea! We can just 3D print asteroids, and then mine them.
We'll then have renewable resources forever!
Take that, Koch Brothers!
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I myself was reading TFS and wondering how this was supposed to make nuclear look bad. I am not clear how this submission matches mdsolar's anti nuclear diatribe. Perhaps because you can't use solar underwater, maybe the mining rigs will be nuclear powered?
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Who the hell assured you of such things and did they give you a specific time-frame in which those assurances would be met? I think it's safe to say that the two may very well result in technological and resource advances but giving a time-frame for that to happen in is rather silly. To compound that, why would someone tell you that it solved "all" resource problems? Even if it could, it won't do so immediately.
You should stop listening to idiots. I can't say that I've ever actually seen anyone state such t
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Asteroid mining would do nothing for Earth resources anyways. What would be the point in mining asteroids only to return the materials to Earth, they are worth far more in orbit.
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Yeah, I'm not sure why folks talk about bringing them back to the surface except, maybe, some early efforts or something that's a curiosity or has huge value - like a giant chunk of gold. I've no idea what the final numbers will look like so I'm not even sure if there'd be a legit reason to even bring gold back to the planetary orbit or to the surface at all. I imagine it would take a huge decrease in cost in getting things into orbit before any of it became worth it to go get it. It has to be less expensiv
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Perhaps we should attempt to modify the orbit of an asteroid large enough to at least takeout Kim?
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Are you REALLY sure you want them to try to precision drop an asteroid from space?
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Asteroid mining would do nothing for Earth resources anyways. What would be the point in mining asteroids only to return the materials to Earth, they are worth far more in orbit.
Plenty of buyers in orbit! Lots of factories and consumers!
Oh wait, there aren't any of those things. Raw materials are feedstocks to manufacturing, which make stuff that are put in the hands of consumers (there are many types of consumers). None of that exists in orbit.
Well maybe we could put the factories in orbit?
How much does that cost? Has anyone ever put a factory in orbit? Who services the orbiting factory? Who buys the stuff the factory makes?
A case could be made that one day, centuries from now, wh
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Water and raw metals are very useful to NASA, water can be used as just water, or split up into H2 and O2 for fuel, and raw metals can be used to build structures, and possibly eventually finished products (like circuit boards and stuff). Think how much easier the next orbital space station would be if we used asteroid minerals. Think how useful an orbital "gas" station would be from ice asteroids.
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My cynical self says not going to happen... (Score:1)
History has shown that "responsible mining" is an oxymoron, with Centralia, Love Canal, and many other Superfund sites being examples of this.
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Re:My cynical self says not going to happen... (Score:4, Insightful)
Love Canal wasn't a mining site.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. However I think the poster's point may have been that it's been historically difficult to hold corporations responsible for the messes they leave behind, and when you can't do that it means the public has to pay to clean them up.
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Where buy "bought it" you mean "forced the sale of it". Hooker Chemical didn't want to sell it at any price, and included a proviso in the (forced) sale documents that the land not be built on -- which the local govt promptly ignored.
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This was actually a case of the PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARD going for the cheap land and plopping a school on top of a declared toxic dump site.
Which shouldn't have been there in the first place.
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Toxic dump sites need to exist, so long as toxic waste is being produced. And lots of toxic waste has been and continues to be produced. It needs to be managed with oversight. In the case of Love Canal, the company that produced the waste site acted with due diligence, except for subsequently selling the site to a governmental organization (a school district) who passed the site along to other organizations who voided the site's containment. It was a case of miscommunication and local government incompe
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Yet strangely enough we don't find it necessary today to bury the by-products of the chlor-alkalai process.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious.
No, such things aren't obvious unless you know the history of Love Canal [wikipedia.org]. It wouldn't have been difficult for the poster to google relevant examples. Such sloppiness is instead an indication of how little thought the poster put into their post.
However I think the poster's point may have been that it's been historically difficult to hold corporations responsible for the messes they leave behind, and when you can't do that it means the public has to pay to clean them up.
Let us recall here the fundamentally illegal aspect of Superfund, namely, punishing a party for legal activity (often as other posters have noted with the Love Canal case, exacerbated by another negligent party after the pollution occurred). If the public wants legal
Re:My cynical self says not going to happen... (Score:4, Informative)
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What makes you think that mining would cause some kind of release that hasn't happened despite all the normal disturbing of these clathrates? Do you think that suddenly the clathrates will explode when touched?
If this was in any way possible, it would have already happened from some other process.
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Human greed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Human greed will destroy us all. Sooner of later, these mega-corporations are going to discover that you can't eat money -- but of course by then it'll be too late. Even now, we deny what's happening globally.
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Says the guy using a pile of rare earths and polymers to emote all over the internets.
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Unfortunately my desire for Schadenfreude is greater than my desire for survival. I just hope I'm there to see the faces of those who run the mega-corporations when they realize that it is too late so that I can receive my satisfaction at their misfortune.
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What was your point? That we already deal with this type of thing on a regular basis?
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The solution to rising sea levels! (Score:5, Funny)
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Size (Score:1)
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The ocean is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little mineral exploration isn't going to harm it at all.
The first question that comes to my mind is what effect all the sediment that gets kicked up will have on the rest of the ocean? A little bit of activity can cast quite a lot of fine silt into the currents, which will travel far outside the confines of any mining area.
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The problem is that a relatively small amount of toxins can kill a lot of animals. Look how mercury is a global menace to fish, similar with plastics, and both were caused by people. An oil spill like what happened in the Gulf of Mexico can destroy an entire ocean.
As for huge, we can do huge... the Pacific Gyre is already the size of the United States.
Instead of destroying a food source and possibly ourselves... how about better recycling? Miners would have a lot better yield going through a town dump th
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The ocean is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little mineral exploration isn't going to harm it at all.
True, but if it's profitable they won't be planning on doing just a little. I'm all for it, but a bit of thinking about it ahead of time and some sensible regulations could head off a huge number of unnecessary environmental impacts.
Oceans are fragile (Score:2)
The ocean is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little mineral exploration isn't going to harm it at all.
Nonsense The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few years back would indicate otherwise. The ocean is big but it's also fragile in a lot of ways. It wouldn't be hard at all for us to cause some pretty catastrophic damage. We've already filled good portions of it with plastic and we're adding more daily. We've affected the temperature of the oceans and in some places the salinity. We've created massive dead zones thanks to agricultural runoff. The notion that the oceans are so big we can't harm them is
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The atmosphere is big. I mean huge. Massive. A little CO2 emission isn't going to harm it at all.
Not again! (Score:1)
From about 1970-74, the CIA managed to convince the world that billionaire inventor Howard Hughes had decided to invest millions to mine “manganese nodules,” balls of heavy metals that lie on the ocean floor. It was a cover story for the ship Glomar Explorer to recover a soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the north pacific.
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They may be serious about this time, technology especially robotics have come a long way since those days. Of course it could also be another cover. I'm thinking another impressive cover by the Navy was construction of a rescue sub to rescue crew of a "downed" submarine. These things were outfitted with latest technologies of all kinds of stuff (most had little to do with rescue). It's real purpose was to tap undersea cables, Navy pretty much ruled out submarine rescue because most ocean areas are so deep,
Re: Glomar (Score:2)
They can neither confirm nor deny such information.
That is the sound of inevitability (Score:3)
Except actually, it's not really inevitable. What is? That if we mine the seabed, we will fuck it up.
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Re: That is the sound of inevitability (Score:2)
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This should not be read as support for the idea of mining or as forgiveness for Deepwater. It's simply an observation...
I was on the beach just a little while ago. I'm in the Gulf. I've swum in it, I've eaten food from it, I have boated in it.
While it certainly was tragic and damaging, and should be prevented from recurring, it did not actually kill the Gulf and all the animals in the ecosystem. It was unacceptable, they were punished (but not nearly enough, in my opinion), and we need to take steps to make
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And they are very small activities compared to the size of the earth. Very small. Should we be cleaner. Yep probably. But this "OMG they are mining the seas they will all be dead" is not h
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I say that it's probably a good idea if it can be done with reasonable safety. We want these resources - you might even say we need them. We certainly need them if we want to maintain our current lifestyle. I think we need to be pragmatic about things like this. Idealism seldom works in the real world and Mother Nature is both powerful and fairly resilient.
Seafood (Score:2)
Fortunately I dislike all seafood, so it's all good. /s
More efficient (Score:1)
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Where could we be if all the money dumped into fossil fuels was used for renewables?
At home, burning trees and manure for heat.
Oh, wait, you mean now that we've already built societies on the availability of oil and coal? When we've had decades of the luxury of using different extracts from various crude oil sources for everything from lubricating doors, to powering cars, to fertilizing farmland?
We already are advancing "renewable" adoption as quickly as the things can get mass produced. One of the major factors limiting solar adoption (as the big example) is that the tech level that has
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This is talking about mining mineral resources as opposed to fossil fuels. I'm not sure how we're going to use the Sun to make in-ground resources more plentiful than they already are. :/
I mean, you don't *have* to read the summary or anything but it kind of helps. I suppose I could be misreading it but I decided to double-check my reading. I don't think I'm missing anything. I did not, of course, read the article. I'll read the summary but the article is right out. I am no heretic.
solar cells are made of sand (Score:1)
1 km under the seabed would be safer. (Score:3)
However they could bore a vast network of tunnels 1 km or more below the ocean floor without having much impact on the biosphere. However they are not interested in that because of the costs, and the fact that they are really just after the rich nodules on the surface of the ocean floor, nodules that may have formed in part due to biological processes.
Bull Pucky (Score:2, Insightful)
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We can not even regulate the harm done by commercial fishing which is much easier to observe and regulate. We certainly can not control oil spills nor contaminants from runoff from our rivers and rainfall. So now I am supposed to believe that we can effectively regulate deep ocean mining which pretty much equals dredging the deep ocean bottoms. We can't even deliver lead- free drinking water to Flint. And now there is concern over lead pipes all over our nation. But worse yet the public is not aware of how much asbestos water pipes supply home drinking water as well as water used and sold as bottled water. So I say Bull Pucky to the entire notion of ocean mining.
I suppose we could just not regulate deep sea mining. I'm sure that will go better.
Yeh...but.. (Score:2)
We can be as careful as we like... (Score:1)
... but if we develop the tech, the Chinese will use it to rape the ocean floor like they rape the fisheries.