Supposedly the opsec at the Manhattan Project was so good, significant portions of the workforce had no idea on what they were laboring. Post war interviews thought the facility was all a sham, dedicated to nothing but medical testing.
Think about it, cobalt is too slow. Polonium is ideal - you need a much smaller amount, and in five years it's gone, ten years, it's undetectable. Except that it decays into a specific isotope of lead, which could raise some questions, but you call it a toxin, and hope that the evidence gets destroyed in the process...
> He explained the procedure for transferring the silver and asked, "How much do you need?" I replied, "6000 tons."
> "How many troy ounces is that?" he asked. In fact, I did not know how to convert troy ounces to tons, and neither did he. A little impatient, I responded, "I don't know how many troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6000 tons - that is a definite quantity. What difference does it matter how we express the quantity?"
> He replied rather indignantly, "Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces."
6000 metric tons of silver is approximately 192,904,200 troy ounces, and 6000 US tons of silver is approximately 175,000,000 troy ounces.
I'm finding "The Manhattan Project: the Important Role Silver Played In the Building of the Atomic Bomb" <https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Manhattan-Projec...> (2015).
Groves' deputy, Nichols, who was responsible for the loan, also told the story in more detail in 1987 memoir, "The Road to Trinity."
When the building we were in got renovated some enterprising guys in another workshop ripped up their floor boards and their neighbouring empty suites and got all the precious metals out of the gaps between the floorboards.
The building was 11 stories and was predominantly filled with small jewellery workshops with 2-5 people per business. And a lot of adjacent businesses (trade supplies, stone merchants etc).
Would that be your partner?
Right, some recovery does occur—gold from edge/contact connectors etc. but I'd venture it's only a small fraction of what is used annually. And what about LEDs and transistors? I wonder if anyone ever bothers to recover the gallium and indium from them or whether the amount used isn't worth the effort.
Hopefully, as you suggest, we will eventually be energy rich and can afford mass separation techniques to recover these elements. Nevertheless, unless some very cleaver as yet uninvented techniques are used then the amount of energy involved would likely be enormous (but I'm almost certain such techniques will be available in the foreseeable future).
Incidentally, for the same reason, I'm not overly worried about the necessity for having inordinately long-term storage for nuclear waste (hundreds of thousands of years), as in an energy-rich world there'd be enough energy to enable the use of transmutation techniques (along with fast breeders, etc.) to ensure these dangerous byproducts are 'burnt' to harmless materials. Basically, whilst nuclear waste is a big problem it's a comparatively short-term one.
That said, we're doing a pretty poor job of repurifying recycled materials now and the reasons are multifold. I'll give an example I've come across but there are hundreds more. Batteries of any kind should never be thrown away because of the valuable materials they contain. To my knowledge, with the exception of lead-acid batteries, an unknown amount of used battery material is recycled annually, but the effectiveness of what is actually recycled is limited due (it seems†) to the difficulty of repurifying said materials.
For example, recycled reagents and other components, depolarizers such as manganese dioxide, are (often?) insufficiently pure to ensure a battery's long-term storage life. Instead of say an alkaline cell having a nominal storage life of about six years, impure components contain unwanted ionic/conductive materials that lead to a much increased self-discharge rate that shortens shelf life (I've seen such cells become discharged in only about one third the time of those with well-purified materials).
No doubt higher levels of purification would be achieved if more energy were inputted into re-refining these materials. That said, this re-refining problem isn't just limited to batteries but is intrinsic to many recycling processes. Probably the best known and most problematic is that of separating used plastics together with their cracking/depolymerization. Again, it's almost certain these problems would be eliminated if enough cheap energy were available.
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† Obviously, repurifying recycled materials is different to their original refining from ores etc. as repurifying processes would be required to remove unwanted materials that were never present in the original refining process. I am unclear about what this involves and or the extent of its deployment as there seems precious little information about it in the public domain.
I wonder now how much gold dust gets accumulated in the lungs of goldsmiths. I wonder if they take organs to check for sweeps.
Depending on the work, it may also require frequent trips to the hearth for torch work. You really don't want to use an oxy/propane torch in a sealed glovebox.
In short, it's too much hassle and makes the work more difficult and much slower.
I was a jeweler for a couple years and the common practice was to have carpet and a sticky trap at the door. The carpet was torn up every few years and used to throw a company vacation.
You need outside air ventilation.
There is lots of mechanical suction for things like polishing to capture the waste material for post processing.
Most will wear a leather apron for heat / burn protection and capturing fine dust/dirt from polishing compounds. I suppose you could destroy that eventually in a giant smelter.
I call marketing stunt. Most unlikely not a truthful representation of what to expect when doing it yourself.
Some less than reputable places will try to off-handedly say it was discarded. They don't lose anything.
https://old.reddit.com/r/jewelry/comments/vno1to/question_re...
Edit: oops, never mind
Or just get sheet vinyl or something.
A vinyl sheet will just lose it to people's boots.
10k$ over ten years is also not that much per day. So he might be happy to make the trade-off for having a nice carpet.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/06/22/new-york...
https://www.igi.org/digging-for-gold-in-new-yorks-sidewalks/
Person, who makes money off people believing they can find treasure, makes video about how easy it is to find treasure. "Oh btw you can buy these utils for 25$ in my store."
Media literacy says : trust level 2/10, most probably lies and marketing
Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!
Scrap value, yes, purchase price, no :)
The quick sanity test is to ask why big name jewelers can sell the same style ring at all sizes for the same price, despite perhaps 25% difference in mass. The majority of the retail sales price is not the precious metal value.
This made me wonder what the health benefits of having lungs of gold might be.
Remains to be seen, perhaps?
Wiktionary: From Middle English lymail, from Anglo-Norman limaille, from Latin limare, a form of limo (“to file”); see further there.
> Mr Wibberley recalls when a parquet floor in its own factory was ripped up and the precious metals embedded in the wood made it worth £20 per sq m.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM5-xFenaZI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Your_Wagon_(film)
https://archive.org/details/paint-your-wagon-western-comedy-...
(Money shot at 1:44:30!)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/26/the-pots-of...
A homeless man would go and brush the sidewalks at night. The story is that there was so much gold and diamond dust on the clothes of the people working in that area that it would fall off of their clothes and accumulate on the sidewalks.