Cobalt and the Congo

The Trouble With Cobalt | Answers With Joe
I don't like his attitude about how renewable energy sources are going to take over the world. If god had wanted us to drive electric cars he wouldn't have given us thousand horsepower internal combustion engines. That's my own personal problem, pay me no mind. Joe's probably right, doesn't mean I have to like it. But all that is just a distraction from the real story, er, stories: Cobalt and the Congo.

The problem with artisanal mines is not that they are dangerous, the problem is that evidently it's the best opportunity the miners have for making a living. Now it could be that there are some unscrupulous people who compelling people to work like slaves, but once again, it's the overall economic situation in that country. Squeezing out the small mines may only serve to consolidate the big mining company's hold. Small mines may be dangerous, but if they are successful they may also provide a way out of the extreme poverty that got the miners into this situation in the first place.

The video is a little long for this blog (30 minutes) but it's got the best summary of the history of the Congo I've come across. People can be ruthless. Don't know if I could ever be that ruthless. Well, yes, I could. Just deprive me of a good night sleep for a week or two and see how much I care about anybody.

Previous post about Cobalt.

The Widow

The Widow - Official Trailer | Prime Video
'Crazy people running around with blood in their eyes' pretty much sums it up. The story jumps back and forth in time and between Africa and England. Some of the jumps make sense, but most of them are just there to leave a little cliff hanger, which I must admit, I kind of enjoy. Oh, it irritates me, but it gets me stirred up which is a good thing. My emotions need their exercise, you know.

Africa seems to have no end of horror stories to tell, but from this movie, it appears that most of the people are just going about their everyday business. I mean we have big cities with skyscrapers and international airports. Yes, there are men with guns running around in the bush just outside of town, but it's a big country and there aren't all that many men with guns, so you can avoid them, and as long as the militia are not right there in your neighborhood, life goes on as normal as in any peaceful country.

The lead characters are all varying degrees of wacko. It's understandable as they have all been through some pretty horrendous events, most of which they instigated themselves. Most of them end up dead, which is kind of telling.

A miner shows a bag containing coltan in Katanga Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Aug. 2008. ALFREDO FALVO/CONTRASTO/REDUX

There is a thin line running through this whole story, and that is smuggling coltan out of the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo). There are some scenes of a coltan mine scattered throughout the series, but it's a pretty feeble operation, a few dozen people working in muddy pools on the surface, much like the picture above. But in the beginning of the last episode they take you on a tour of how it it mined, bagged, transported, combined with the output from dozens of other mines (must be dozens or even hundreds if they are all as small as the one we were shown) and smelted. They skip the part about how the metal is made into capacitors, but then they take you to a modern smart phone assembly line and deliver that phone to one of the characters in the show who is ranting about something to do with coltan production. Clever.

Only about a thousand tons of tantalum are produced each year, so it's not like coal where a thousand tons are mined every second.

8 episodes on Amazon Prime Video

Argentium

Custom Toyota Supra Engine

All I need is a little paint and polish to satisfy my craving for fancy machinery, but for some people that is not enough. Apparently these engraved pieces are real gold and silver. The silver might be Argentium which is a special alloy that employs Germanium. Sterling silver is typically an alloy containing about 7% copper. The copper gives it strength, but it can also cause discoloration when the metal is heated. Argentium solves that problem.


Argentium is Firescale Free
This is all new to me. I've only heard of germanium being used in high-performance transistors and solar cells. High-performance usually means more expensive because if it was just as cheap as regular performance no one would use the lower performance product, every one would use the high-performance version and we wouldn't call it 'high-performance'. So germanium must be at least semi-rare, or difficult to mine. Just over 100 tons is produced annually, which is pretty small potatoes when you compare it to things like aluminum (59 million tons) and steel (1.7 billion tons).

Germanium is produced as a by-product of zinc mining. Zinc is mined all over the world. Ivanhoe Mines has resurrected an old mine in the Congo that promises to be a good producer.


Kipushi Project
So even though there are a number of shitheads running around making trouble, capitalization marches on, and as long as they are providing decent jobs, they are the good guys.

Update the next morning. I got to thinking that Periodic Videos probably had a video about germanium. They do, but he doesn't tell you much other than it is opaque to visible light but transparent to infrared light.

Russian Pilots of the Congo

All we hear from the news is how awful things are in war-torn Africa, rebels this, massacres that, but those are just the incidents that catch big media's attention. Meanwhile, daily life and commerce goes on pretty much regardless, and these guys are part of that. I noticed that they did not make any comments on the condition of the aircraft they were flying.

Brits in Africa

Looking at lakes in Africa, starting with Lake Tele in Congo (the country, as opposed to "the Congo" portion of Africa). It's basically a two mile wide wet spot in the middle of miles of untracked jungle. Looking around for other lakes, I notice there is nothing until we get to the other side of the Democratic Republic of Congo and I find lakes on the border with Uganda, and what are their names? Albert and Edward. Think the Brits were here? And then there's the big one: Lake Victoria, scene of the torpedo attack at the end of The African Queen and the Raid on Entebbe. Entebbe is just South of Kampala and the airport is right on the shore of Lake Victoria. Nairobi is the nearest big city to Kampala, and it is 300 miles away. Sharon got me started on this.

Rock Monsters

I've been thinking about what aliens might be like if we ever run into any. Shoot, they might be here on earth, but so different from us that we don't even recognize each other, much less as living beings.

A few months ago I was reading the Dinosaur Planet series by Anne McCaffrey (not really all that great) but there was an alien race called the Thak (sp?), who were large, brick-like creatures with exceptional travel abilities. Yesterday I read about the latest impact crater discovered in Africa, only now made visible from a satellite because of deforestation.


View Impact Crater D.R. Congo in a larger map

This morning I read about a woman who wants to put an accelerometer into every PC to form vast network for monitoring earthquakes. Then there are the tube worms who live around hot water vents on the bottom of the sea.

Put these all together and I came up with creatures who are burrowing in the earth, ever farther down as their planet cools. The only decent source of heat is the core of the planet, and it's been cooling down for eons, so the temperate zone has receded from the surface of the planet, and as it has receded, the creatures have had to adapt to burrowing ever father down.

This process has been going on for eons and the creatures have become ever more like their surroundings. They can survive even when crushed. Crushing may distort them somewhat, but would not seriously damage them. They are like just another rock. They can survive extremely high temperatures, temperatures, that might make rock malleable.

The have developed exquisite sound/vibration sensors/communications, so if anything lands on the surface, they would know about it. Perhaps not right away, but they would notice an anomaly, which might prompt them to launch an investigation to the surface to see who dares to tread on their planet.

Lego has their own take on this subject:



Update January 2018 replaced link to story about a crater. Old link went to a Graham Hancock story that has gone 404. New one goes to a BBC story of the same vintage.