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News
A Dutch contractor just dropped 300,000 tons of rock onto 52 offshore wind foundations off the Dutch coast, more than four times the weight of the steel it is protecting, because the water running past each 30-foot pile digs a pit the tide never fills back in
5+ hour, 6+ min ago (1664+ words) That is not a figure of speech. Push a 30-foot steel tube into sand and the water accelerating around it scoops a pit at the base. Engineers call it scour, and nobody has found a way to talk it out…...
A 43-foot steel beam weighing 15,890 pounds rides 4,850 feet down an old South Dakota gold mine standing upright in a cage 4.5 feet wide, one of roughly 2,100 pieces that have to make the same trip before summer ends
5+ day, 8+ hour ago (1178+ words) It was also the operation that made George Hearst rich after he bought the claim in 1877, money that later helped bankroll his son William Randolph’s newspaper empire. The company’s stock sat on the New York Stock Exchange longer than any…...
America just handed out the federal recipe for mining uranium from the ocean instead of the ground: cheap yarn, chemically treated until the metal sticks to it, left soaking in seawater for weeks, proven so far at five grams, the weight of a nickel
1+ week, 3+ day ago (1598+ words) Uranium comes out of the ground. You find a deposit, you drill it or you pump acid through it, and what comes back up gets milled into yellowcake and shipped off to be turned into reactor fuel. That has been…...
An 11-foot drill core just came out of Western Australia carrying 32 ounces of gold in a single ton of rock, roughly 500 times the grade that keeps a working mine in business, and the ton is still 99.9 percent plain stone
1+ week, 5+ day ago (1070+ words) Gold mining is mostly a business of moving dirt. The pits are enormous, the haul trucks are enormous, and the metal hiding inside all that rock gets measured in grams per tonne rather than pounds. Two grams to the tonne…...
Australia runs drill rigs that sink a 59-foot hole in a single pass with 75,000 pounds behind the bit and nobody in the cab, taking orders from a control room in Perth more than 900 miles away, and they've been doing it for ten years
3+ week, 4+ day ago (1404+ words) Self-driving cars have been almost ready for about fifteen years. The robotaxis that made it out of the lab are fenced into a few sunny cities with the roads mapped down to the curb, and they’ll still stop dead for…...
An American engineer just spent his own savings buying back the last two robots that bore through rock without touching it, cooking 44,000-PSI quartzite with an 1,800-degree gas jet, after the company that built them folded
3+ week, 5+ day ago (1300+ words) Every tunnel boring machine on Earth works on the same brutally simple idea. A wheel studded with steel discs spins against the rock face, crushes it into rubble, and conveyors haul the mess out the back. That is why the…...
A California company built a seabed mining drone that hovers above the ocean floor instead of crawling it, picking up battery metals one nodule at a time with 16 arms, and leaving nearly a third behind on purpose, the ones with living things attached
1+ mon, 3+ day ago (1356+ words) The usual picture of deep-sea mining is a giant tractor crawling along the ocean floor, sucking rocks up by the ton and pumping them four kilometers to a ship on the surface. That picture is accurate. It’s how the company…...
Canada has $10 billion in nickel sitting in old mining waste, metal already dug up once and thrown away. Nobody could afford to get it back, so a research group is feeding 150 years of that garbage to a tank of bacteria instead
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (587+ words) Sudbury has been a mining town for roughly a century and a half, which means the region is ringed with tailings, the leftover rock and sediment left after ore gets its first pass through processing. Those piles aren’t empty. They’re…...
Most people know antimony as the stuff that keeps couches from catching fire. The Pentagon knows it as what goes in armor-piercing rounds, and China controls it, so a 168-year-old mine in rural Australia is coming back to life
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (122+ words) Most people, if they have heard of antimony at all, know it as the thing that keeps couches and curtains from catching fire. That is fair enough. Its single biggest use is as a flame retardant, and it also turns…...
China just started drilling with a 500-ton machine it calls an "underground aircraft carrier," boring a vertical shaft a kilometer deep, and it cracked the hardest problem by copying a pencil sharpener
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (291+ words) For scale, 500 metric tons is roughly the weight of the reactor pressure vessel the world’s largest crane just lowered into Hinkley Point C. Except nobody lifts this thing into place and walks away. It hangs in its own shaft and…...