Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

Recovering Rare Earths

15 Comments

…from recycling electronics and coal fly ash.

Whenever I see a breakthrough in processing like this, I always wonder how applicable it will be to space resources.

When I was at Rockwell thirty years ago, one of the projects I managed, with Ed McCullough (who died a couple years ago–NSS needs to update the page) and the late Bob Waldron was in adapting processes they’d been working on for beneficiation of lunar regolith to recover high-quality silicon and other things from fly ash. I guess it ended up not going anywhere after I left in 1993.

15 thoughts on “Recovering Rare Earths”

  1. When I was at Rockwell thirty years ago, one of the projects I managed, with Ed McCullough (who died a couple years ago–NSS needs to update the page) and the late Bob Waldron

    Rand, I hope your team’s work got written down. By the time we get back on the Moon, the legacy Apollo folks will be long gone and I’m afraid a lot of this is going to have to be ‘re-discovered’.

    2. I forget who the guest was but there was one on the Space Show who said the first thing any aspiring space company needs to do is hire a librarian.

  3. Back in the mid-seventies, a neighborhood friend of my parents was raising funds for a company that had supposedly developed a new process to cheaply pull large amounts of gold and other precious metals from fly ash. He later did the same thing for a company that had a prototype of an egg-shaped, propeller-powered car. Luckily, my folks weren’t big on risky investments and lost no money when both of these schemes went belly up and left their investors holding the bag. Hopefully this new process is standing on more solid ground.

  4. I had to look up “fly ash,” I guess because I grew up where our power needs were met by hydro and, briefly, nuclear — rather than coal. Back when power needs could actually be met in California…

    For just the barest moment I did wonder just how much ash one could get from burning houseflies, and how that would help recover useful minerals on the moon.

    1. I had a similar moment, though it caused me to wonder how many pairs of pants would need to be burned…

    2. :Heh: My mother told me about her childhood in Lansing, MI downwind of the great automotive plants. They had to pull down their window curtains weekly to wash all of the soot and flyash coming from the coal furnaces under the towering smokestacks.

      But that was when Lansing (and Detroit for that matter) were some of the most prosperous cities in the US… The pollution is gone but so are all of the jobs — all exported overseas.

      1. I recall a trip to Cleveland in 1968 during which fly ash fell continuously from the sky like some Mordor-ian form of precipitation. That was the biggest reason I crossed Case Western Reserve off my list of potential alma maters.

  5. If the fly ash has radioactive elements, can those be used to make nuclear fuel? Does it have to be Uranium, or is that another administrative decision?

    1. For a fission reactor the practical options are limited. The isotopes I know of:
      – U235 can burn directly in a reactor.
      – U238 can be converted to Pu239 which can power a reactor.
      – Th232 can be converted to U233 which can power a reactor.

      For a radioisotope decay generator their are more options, but to my knowledge usually use artificial isotopes.

    3. According to the USGS, U.S. coal contains about 1 ppm of uranium. Fly ash is about 10% of the weight of the original coal, and thus should contain 10 ppm of uranium.

      A 1,000 MWe coal plant uses a “unit train” of coal a day, which is 100 coal cars, each carrying 100 tons of coal. That results in 1,000 tons of fly ash per day. At 10 ppm uranium, one could extract 20 pounds per day. It would take forever to get enough to fuel even one small reactor

      1. Fly ash has much more thorium than uranium, and thorium has a much higher utilization factor (it’s all potentially fertile). I think the FLiBe energy folks noted that there’s more energy in the thorium in fly ash than we get from burning the coal.

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