Posts by Stephen Judd
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Below, an excerpt from Dad's letter to the Herald:
Mining for rare earth metals on Stewart Island is on the Government's to-do list. Mr Brownlee quotes rare earths as worth up to $300-$500 per kilo. Only the two rarest (Europium and Terbium) of the fourteen are worth anything like as much.
Lynas Corporation and Arafura Resources, two Australian miners of rare earths, both published investor presentations this March. They both state US$13 as the average price per kilo of rare earth oxides (REO).
Between them, the two companies forecast selling each year 42,000 tonnes of REO extracted from 920,000 tonnes of ore. A Lynas presentation photograph shows a stockpile of 740,000 tonnes of ore beside an open pit. Even a small Stewart Island mine will be a hard to hide eyesore, not to mention the extraction plant.
Rare earth mining is famously hard on the environment. One problem is the vast amounts of sulphuric acid used in extracting the metals and another is what to do with the ore after extraction? To quote Lynas on Chinese rare earth environmental problems : " I've seen how they're extracted and processed and it's not pretty".
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do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
I've had some lovely freebies from the Brazilian embassy: food, drink and music. Cause they care about culture. It has occurred to me that keeping my ear to the ground about diplomatically-funded occasions and the odd gallery opening would keep one fed and watered quite a lot of the time.
And then there's funerals...
... one can have a Jolley time.
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So I was talking my Dad just now, retired organic chemist and occasional mining stock investor. And he points out to me that typical yield for rare earth ore is on the order of 0.04% by weight. Meanwhile, you need a buttload of sulphuric acid to dissolve the good stuff out of the rock. So you end up with great lakes of wastewater and huge piles of spoil.
Another other angle is that while the most expensive rare earths are $hundreds per kg right now, that's just right now -- a historic peak, and other rare earths are much cheaper. And even at $100s per kg, that means to get, say, a million dollars worth of rare earth mineral means somehow disposing of 10s of thousands of tons of contaminated spoil.
The best bet from a cosmetic POV is actually coal. You don't get heaps of spoil from coal and if it's not washed it's not very polluting of the immediate environment (until you burn it) either.
Dad's just marshalling all the data now for a letter to the editor, because he's old school in that respect, but I've asked for a copy for blogging purposes. His info is based on mining company investor statements (eg Lynas and Arafura in Australia) so it'll be rosy if anything.
A last thought: most mining companies burn through investor money and then fail without ever paying tax or royalties -- they just leave a smallish mess from their pilot plants. The ones that do survive are worth punting on precisely because they have paid so much up front that they have years of tax credits piled up. You can bet that foreign owned ones will be structured so that they pay minimal tax here -- that's how the Aussie-owned ones do it.
I am strongly leaning towards the idea, based on other posters' observations of increased prospecting licenses in a few select areas just before the election, that some big National donor has their eye on a particular place in the South Island. Key will graciously accede to public demand never to mine Great Barrier or the Coromandel, we'll all admire how sensible he is, and a crucial place for some political investor will be the "token" mining allowed.
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no crucifix Entreats
Ah well, those buggers with the tower on Mt Vic fixed that.
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I have to agree with Robyn. Surely the reason to prefer "Wellington" over the "the Government" is the implied contrast with Auckland, which injects some juicy parochial conflict.
If it were just a question of elegant metonymy, "the Beehive" would be more accurate.
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Lucy: I think the tea partiers know very well what they're arguing about.
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Don't worry Sacha. CCO directors will be appointed through an appropriate process, I'm sure.
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One thing Gattung said when she was interviewed on NatRad recently really intrigued me: that most NZers in her view wanted Telecom to be run like a public utility and would be happier if it were an SOE.
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Apropos Telecom: my plan.
Apropos the DIA filter: I would like a little more focus on the (in my view badly misnamed) Independent Reference Group. As far as I can tell, the members of the group are chosen by the department. According to Barton's article, they will not even be able to see the list of banned sites -- they will merely get some sort of description of what was done from DIA. In what sense is this group independent?
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Hot tip for all cyclists btw: I got a handlebar mirror a few weeks ago and it's greatly improved my rides around town. When the ambient noise level is high, quiet modern cars or trolleybuses can sneak up behind and catch you completely unawares, but no more, now I have a mirror.