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Tantalum in the real world 21st century

A

alanb

SOC-13
Here is some stuff about Tantalum in the real world. It's not nice. Please avoid flame wars about all this.

This is an excerpt from:
"Victim’s Licence
Our fairytale version of Rwanda's genocide has allowed us to overlook the
government's own crimes against humanity
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th April 2004"
...
"By 1999, the "Congo Desk" of the Rwandan army was generating 80% of the
Rwandan military budget - some $320 million. This is the equivalent of 20%
of Rwanda's gross national product.2 The money came principally from two
sources: diamonds and coltan. Coltan is the ore from which tantalum, the
expensive metal used in mobile phones, is extracted, and almost all of it
comes from the DRC.

Sixty to seventy per cent of the coltan exported from the eastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo, the United Nations reported in 2002, has been mined
"under the direct surveillance" of the Rwandan army. Most of the rest was
produced by subcontractors and companies answerable to the army or to other
departments of the Rwandan government.3 Kagame's people, in other words, had
a near-monopoly on global coltan production."
 
if anything this creates some excellent places to adventure around.

how valuable is the resource, vs the value of the animal/plant/human life around it.

enviromentalism, vs commercialism...

I suspect earth is a pretty damaged place after 300 years of high industry catching up all over the 3rd world.

Though... with the ability to mine asteroid fields, it almost becomes un nessisary to mine planets anymore. I heard somewhere, and I'm completly lacking any source to back me up, so I am not sure how accurate it is... but that there are rocks in our own solar system, that have trillions of dollars worth of iron ore... let alone much more valuable minerals such as tantalum...

And, its a lot cheaper to move things down the gravity well, then it is back up...
 
duran.goodyear wrote:

Though... with the ability to mine asteroid fields, it almost becomes un nessisary to mine planets anymore. I heard somewhere, and I'm completly lacking any source to back me up, so I am not sure how accurate it is... but that there are rocks in our own solar system, that have trillions of dollars worth of iron ore... let alone much more valuable minerals such as tantalum...
Click to expand...
But just try to find that asteriod with a rare earth or valuable heavy metal out amongst all that empty space.

Iron/Nickel, that might be easier. I bet the first people to seriously go into space will stake claims on the big asteriods and then just hope for multiple ores being present.
 
In the Earth/Cyberpunk Sorucebook, the Central Asian Republic is described as prospecting for tantalum-rich asteroids, hoping to find enough tantalum to make it rich.
 
Tantalum would be very rare in asteroids - it's pretty rare on Earth. So there'd be no such thing as a "tantalum asteroid" - if you're lucky you might find something that contains a tiny, trace amount, but chemical processes that concentrate minerals in the crusts of planets just wouldn't occur on asteroids (unless perhaps they're very big, like Ceres).

The best place to look for more Tantalum would be on a full-blown planet.

(More info on Tantalum and its uses and abundances can be found at the WebElements site ).


The same goes for Lanthanum (used in Traveller for jump drives), for that matter.
 
And in the OTU, a great many asteroid belts are shattered worlds.

But prospecting would be a matter of going around with a mass-spectrometer scope (of the kind in use today by the USGS) looking for surface indications of Tantalum ore, or surface indications of something that might indicate the presence of Tantalum ore. Oh yes, and probably a densitometer, too.

Also, in a shattered world remnant asteroid belt, left over core fragments might have a radically different makeup than crustal fragments.
 
Technically, this is the problem with shattering worlds anyway - you'd never be able to shatter them so much that they'd spread around the whole orbit of the planet. You'd break it into chunks sure, but after a while it'd just reform back together again. To turn a planet into an asteroid belt, you need to find a way to (a) spread the bits out over the entire orbit of the planet and (b) keep the bits from ever reforming. The problem with the latter is that if such an influence is there (probably a nearby gas giant disrupting the belt, as with our belt), then the planet wouldn't have formed in the first place.

But this is another one of those niggly realism things that Traveller ignores anyway.
 
Or you get Grandfather involved. Playing with asteroid impacts, I found that accelerating (say) Ceres to a substantial fraction of lightspeed and throwing it at a garden world would be a good way of shattering that unfortunate globe.
 
The Earth basically got 'shattered' when the mars-sized protoplanet hit it to form the Moon... and it reformed.

Lobbing Ceres - or any big asteroid - at several thousand km/s at a planet would probably just vaporise or utterly annihilate everything. There wouldn't be any rubble left, given the energies involved.

Like I said, it's not enough to just 'break' the planet - you have to somehow spread the material throughout the entire orbit - which can be a HUGE area of space (the circumference of a 1 AU orbit is nearly a billion km) - and also prevent it from reforming eventually (since the bits will eventually start to collide, which will make bigger bits, which will pull more bits in because they're more massive, which will make bigger bits, etc etc).

Even if you could do that, the crust - which is probably where elements like Tantalum or Lanthanum would be concentrated - is only a tiny portion of the volume of a planet. The chance of you encountering an asteroid that was formerly part of the crust would be extremely low compared to finding one that was once in the mantle or core of the planet.
 
We have the example of meteorites that allegedly came from Mars. Heavy bolide bombardment could scour a smaller planet's surface and provide mineral enrichment for a nearby asteroid belt.
 
The fragments hurled into space by a serious impact wouldn't be very large, I'd imagine. Compared to the total mass out there, they'd be vanishingly hard to find.
 
But we must speculate on what sort of TL-25 to 30 handwavium weaponry was being used in the Ancient's War. Perhaps multi-thousand kilometer long, stasis-field jacketed, monomolecular strands were used to slice a planet up, followed by rapid fire bombardment of the remaining chunks with neutronium cannons (firing golf ball size masses of the material found on neutron stars). That should procduce lots of convenient chunks floating all over the place, with the impacts serving to distribute the belt (but blowing most of the material out-system, where they might have either left stellar orbit entirely, or been caught in the outer Oort orbits. But even though accretion could begin again immediately, is 300,000 years enough to reverse that kind of damage? Wouldn't most of the chunks be floating around in the orbit slot, inching closer to one another across considerable distances (our asteriod belt is mostly empty space, after all).

<waving my hands, you can't see the problems with this, don't look too close!>
 
Also, the first thing that happes when you start whamming asteroids into planets is that the crust melts, destroying most of your complex minerals and returning them to an undifferentiated melt. If you wallop a planet hard enough to shatter it, it shatters in a liquid form, as the energy tramsmission is quiet sufficent to render the solid into a liquid.

It is the act of planet forming, and the slow cooling and subsequent differentiation of that melt, that lets late-melt forming minerals appear. Smaller asteroidal bodies cool too quickly for the really interesting minerals to form.

G.
 
Undifferentiated is not the same as homogenous; a gob of molten planetstuff can still have a concentration of Ta far above cosmological average.
 
Originally posted by Straybow:
Undifferentiated is not the same as homogenous; a gob of molten planetstuff can still have a concentration of Ta far above cosmological average.
Click to expand...
Indeed it could. However energy sufficent to reduce a planet to plantessimals and then blast them appart with sufficent force to overcome their own mutual gravitational attraction will reduce the planet to a homegenous melt, and will vapourise a good deal of it anyway, which will then condense again as more homogenised melt.

It is the subsequent cooling process which allows the molten tantalum (and other minerals) to form into crystals. One of the major differences between planitessimals and planets is that a planet has sufficent size and mass to retain longer term heat, firstly by attracting other planitessimals which het the main body during impact, and later by radiogenic decay. This longer term heat allows the differentiation process to take place, and the formation of late melt complex minerals.

The proinciple ore of Tantalum is Tantalite, although there are about 20 other tantalum bearing minerals. Tantalite is typically found in pegmatites and other deep crustal rocks which have been upthrust. Its apperance in these massively grained, and hence high tempratyure and pressure deep rocks, shows how it requires a long cooling process to form, and would need a significant impact of a planet to be found in planetessimals.

Smaller planitessimals, whilst they would retain the gross chemical make up of a larger body, would differ in chemistry considerably. However, even if they did form from a Ta rich melt, the melts will still cool much quicker, stunting crystal growth and mineral formation. The Ta would remain locked in a chemically enriched groundmass, whilst the earlier melt minerals such as nickle, iron and so on will form the bulk of the economically viable mineralisation.

G.
 
There are different types of tantalum minerals, of which tantalite is the most important. But microlite, wodginite, euxenite, polycrase, samarskite and fergusonite are also tantalum minerals. Tantalite has the same mineral structure as columbite, and when there is more tantalum than niobite it is called tantalite, and when there is more niobite than tantalum it is called columbite or niobite. In Africa the two minerals are equally refered to as coltan, and according to the United States Geological Survey the Democratic Republic of Congo produced less than 1% of the world's tantalum for the past four years.

Currently by far the world's largest producer of tantalum is Australia, with Brazil, Canada, China, Ethiopia and Mozambique also producing significant quantities of tantalum. Tantalum is also produced in Thailand and Malaysia as a by-product of tin mining and smelting. Other future sources of tantalum may be found in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Greenland, the USA and Finland.
 
We know from 1st edition that tantalum has pretty much gone from the Earth, it was some valuable that prettymuch every grade of ore was used, they even mined under the Antarctic. Where the tantalum was is primarily a historic question in 2k3 (or 2k32).
 
BMonnery said:
We know from 1st edition that tantalum has pretty much gone from the Earth, it was some valuable that prettymuch every grade of ore was used, they even mined under the Antarctic. Where the tantalum was is primarily a historic question in 2k3 (or 2k32).
Click to expand...

There seems to be some deposits left on Earth.

In the various descriptions of the Tantalum War we learn that Indonesia got so much tantalum reserves from Bengal that they could build and maintain a trade fleet. In 2320 AD we learn that the amount found in the Andaman Sea was less than Indonesia hade expected.

Spain traded its reserves, but on Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook page 51 we learn that some small scale extraction is still left. Portugal seems to have some minor deposits too.

Azania seems to have some deposits left, and the Central Asian Republic is believed to have large reserves waiting to be mined. On page 56 in the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook it seems to have been one of the reasons for the Central Asian War. Manchuria is also stated to have some reserves.

Mozambique is the nation that tantalum built. This is not mentioned in 2320 AD, where Mozambique is put as Tier 4 nation without much comment. The description of Mozambique of a very rich nation could still be valid though, and with Mozambique still in possession of vast reserves of tantalum. It does pose some concerns of how well the tier system measures a nations position in world politics.

Finally in 2320 AD Iran is stated to have some small reserves on page 64, there are rumours of Uruguay have some small reserves on page 59 and Antarctica is described on page 69 as not having been prospected for tantalum yet.
 
We know the 2300 distribution of tantalum, and the Andaman sea deposit wasn't sufficient for building either a merchant or cruiser GG1 unit, it was enough for a survey or frigate unit.

In fact the apparent amounts of Ta seem to be totally inadequate for the expansion that occurred, so I guess a lot was found offworld. Indeed, the Clarke's star article mentions those that got a toehold in space "ripping apart" planets for Ta, it was that valuable.

2320 might say Antarctica hasn't been explored yet. GDW said otherwise, the British fought several pseudo-wars to grab the Greenland and Antarctic Ta. GDW was clear, 74 tantalum strikes were made on Earth, they've all been mined out. There is hope that others will be found, but no mining is occurring.
 
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