Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
This article isn't very good. It starts by mentioning some information about Foxconn. Suicides, for example, are less common at Foxconn than in the general population. So things are a bit more complicated than this article portrays.[1]
The article talks about the radioactive waste products. That's normally thorium. But the Lynas site (Mount Weld) has high concentrations of rare earths, is a huge site, and has low levels of thorium contamination. People are rightly concerned about radioactive waste being left in Malaysia. Lynas wanted to ship the radioactive waste back to Australia for processing, but they are forbidden from doing so by Australian law.
Some people are suggesting that Lynas is using Malaysia to avoid environmental laws thus cutting costs. But Malaysia gave them a 12 month tax break, and was already cheaper than Australia, so environmental laws don't appear to be the main motivator. (Although cheaper costs because of less strict environmental protections is probably an important factor.)
It is frustrating that all reporting about this is emotive or otherwise sub-optimal.
[1] I think that conditions at Foxconn are appalling and need to be improved.
It is always amusing when people without even a high school science education seem to write science/engineering articles.
A long half life is inversely related to activity. Heavy radioactive metals like uranium and thorium are toxic heavy metals, but negligible radioactivity, precisely because their half lives are so long. Until recently we didn't even think natural thorium isotopes were radioactive, since the half life is close to the age of the universe.
The really dangerous radioactive isotopes either have fairly short half lives or decay into isotopes with short half lives. A few hundred thousand years is the upper bound for caring, and most of the bad stuff is under a decade. Basically by simple logic none of this will be naturally occurring or it would be gone already.
Plenty of non radioactive material is dangerous, though.
When western countries moved their manufacturing to China and other developing countries they also shipped their pollution over there, which is one of the reasons it is so much cheaper. But we are all living on one single planet. That is why free trade agreements aren't really free, they should include western environmental standards as well as labor standards. Of course that will never happen since giant corporations are the ones that really write our laws. At the current rate we won't be leaving much resources for our grandchildren.
The radioactive waste discussed is Thorium. If we develop Thorium reactors, we could have carbon-free power with greatly reduced weapons proliferation risk, two orders of magnitude more plentiful fuel, and less waste which only lasts 300 years, as opposed to 100,000+. Also, this would open up domestic US reserves of rare earth metals.
I feel sad that no comments got to the core - the unchanging corporate mentality of "man, here's some fertilizer, cement or whatever, dump it somewhere and you'll get bonus if it's fast".
This happens right now too, as you can see from the totally void answers of anyone from Lynas, and that's the main reason why they want to spend huge ammounts of money for shipping to Malaysia - it's still much cheaper than respecting the western environmental laws.
I may be alone in this, but I have a hard time giving credence to any article posted on a site with a specific political agenda.
An efficient modern wind turbine uses at least 82kg of neodymium. Older designs use much more.
http://www.vestas.com/en/about-vestas/sustainability/sustain...
Motherjones as top result on hacker news? Linkbait article rife with poor understanding of radioactivity and economics. Who's up for another erlang day?
Maybe this is a crazy idea, but wouldn't market forces drive down the costs of mining/processing the material if the consumer or the companies purchasing/processing REEs had to pay into cleanup efforts?
Apple makes some pretty serious claims about its environmental impact (http://www.apple.com/environment/). But it doesn't mention refining REEs. Lots about carbon, reducing chemicals such as PVCs, and recycling... Perhaps the market forces that brought carbon to the fore could help correct REEs and reduce the impact on the environment these mining operations incur.
If I were a resident of that area I would be concerned about the plant. While I am suspicious of the technical reporting it seemed clear to me that Lynas isn't being entirely transparent about its environmental assessments and who exactly is approving their projects. When engineers involved are talking to reporters about suspicious activity and large firms are pulling out of the project it does raise some concern that perhaps Lynas isn't doing as much as it could be to ensure even minimal safety concerns are met.
Either way I don't think it's unreasonable for Malaysia and other countries in these sorts of situations to raise awareness about the environmental impacts these kinds of projects have and to enforce a higher degree of scrutiny in approving them. It may raise prices on consumers receiving these goods but it's clear that enough wealth is being generated that we could afford a price-bump.
With enough investment in better recycling technology and hazardous materials management we might be able to slowly reduce that price-bump over time.
But then again, I don't understand enough about economics to believe that is even possible.
The article may be making a rather strong appeal to emotion but it does raise the question of whether there is enough being done from an investigation and regulation angle to protect people from the hazardous side-effects of mining REEs.
It should come as little surprise for readers to learn that the US government has used its occupation of Afghanistan to survey regions rich in rare earth deposits [0]. USGS geologists working under direct cover of military protection in a war zone. I can't wait for the movie version.
Some have argued that part of the reason for prolonging the US engagement has been that these resources are located in regions of Taliban control, but that seems highly speculative. Developing that resource would certainly alter the economic history of that nation.
[0] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistan...
Are there any journalists that understand radio isotopes? "OMG a half-life of 14 billion years" as if thats a bad thing. An extremely long half-life means it's not very radio active, thus not a big problem. Just wait until they hear how long the half-life of a proton is, 6.6×10^33 years! I'd be much more concerned with the swimming pools of sulfuric acid and chemical by products than the radioactivity.
So is there any product that hasn't been somehow manufactured with the help of chinese atrocities?
Tomorrow: The insane secrets behind bottled water (spoiler: the guys driving the trucks hauling the water check their deliveries on a touchpad device that uses one gram of a rare earth metal that came from China!)
How is the waste radioactive? Doesn't that mean that the original materials were also radioactive?
The problem with the radioactive waste is not its radiation. Its usually in check unless it is pulled out of reactor core. The problem for the people in contact with it more often is that it is extremely poisonous.
Something that bothered me about this article was the subtext that "treating" the waste wasn't good enough. How much of that scaremongering is justified?
Well, I hope http://www.fairphone.com/ will do a good job, then.
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Wait til motherjones finds out that their servers are just as dirty as Apple's iPhone. Rare Earths are essential to all electronics, not just smart phones.