Comment by defrost
3 days ago
> Where do you get this idea from..
a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc. Several million line kilometres of environmental radiometric surveying, covering both exploration and industrial settling ponds across many countries. Had a 42 litre crystal pack and spectrometer airborne in Northern India over the 1998 Pokhran-II test series.
> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Try archive.md et al.
See second link:
Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?
Without an abundance of rare earth minerals, renewable energy technologies would not exist in their current form or would be highly inefficient when compared with traditional generation methods such as oil, coal and gas.
> Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive"
Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?
China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).
Right, got it.
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.
All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).
I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.
Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.