Some pathetic subject to placate Gurgle
Jerry
Bienvenue
After a cold and rather uninteresting sojourne en Bretagne it is
pleasant to return to failed central heating (HTML does not yet have a
smell extension, but when it does I'll post some odours)
The fusion stuff is seriously interesting, not joking, alchemy probably
had a sound foundation - it is just a matter of finding the catalyst.
I've vaguely heard of chickens making calcium from potassium
- and that was a long time ago
Drew
to arrange smelly HTML in the near future. And if Gurgle is ambitious,
'tisn't a grievous crime. Feeling all literate tonight with the
thought of a short story title -- "A poke o' chips now".
First line -- "I love the smell of deep fry fat in the morning". I
envisage Glasgae as the setting.
------------------
Did I not write to one of you some time ago outlining my fusion notion?
I'll send a personal mail if you request.
Chickens making calcium from potassium eh. That's about as likely as
someone making weapons of mass destruction out of sand and oil, *and*
anyone believing it. I've long considered extracting gold from
seawater on the basis that the ionisation potential being so low it
should be able to be preferentially reverse electrolysed with a very
low voltage. There is perhaps a slight flaw in the notion though
because bits of metal in the sea with coincidentally small PD don't
get coated in gold. Bioengineering is more promising I guess,
convincing organisms to collect gold just like some plants obligingly
absorb heavy metals, in the way that humans have a propensity for
absorbing lead and hamburgers.
Best
Drew
momentarily" annoy you too. It's just wrong, init.
Jerry
- a) the 'English'
- b) it just ain't true
I certainly would like to hear your hunch on fusion
- I'ld appreciate an Email
Bio collection of metals is rather a good idea, I'm pretty sure that
they already do something along those lines - I have vague memories of
reading something about it
- or maybe it was SF
It would be a joke if they made a bug that ate (say) iron or aluminium
and it got out in the wild
I wonder whether gold is actually dissolved in sea water
- gold coins tend to survive
IIRC one of the few things that will disolve gold is cyanide ...
My chemistry teacher worked in the South African gold fields
- people would use cyanide coated rods to nick gold
Drew
neutron radiation gets me first. (It's all done with mirrors BTW).
No you're right, bio metal extraction is I think actually being
experimented on old dump sites. Now if one could create a plant which
selected 235 and rejected 238....... Few extracts from web pages after
an extensive search -- couple of minutes :-
an estimated 70 million metric tons of gold dissolved in seawater
but it is the concentration range of 3 ppb(parts per billion). To
collect three gram of gold (3 parts per million)you would need 3
billion divided by 3 million ie 1000 tonnes of water
The idea of electrowinning gold (or other valuable metals) from
seawater has been around for years, basically since the development of
electrochemistry. The problem is that while there is a lot of gold
dissolved in seawater, it is a very dilute solution. It has always been
prohibitive in terms of energy costs to actually extract gold. There
are also ideas of chemically concentrating the gold (or other metals)
before electrowinning, but that's complicated by the presence of so
many other elements that would be simaultaneously [sic] concentrated.
Now, if a culture had access to advanced genetic engineering, they
could devise a bacteria or plant species that concentrates gold. Some
existing land plants (horsetail ferns, IIRC) already do a very good job
of concentrating heavy metals. And there is serious research into this
field, as a method of extracting gold from low grade ores or tailings.
http://www.gold.org/Indu/GBull/1999_2/ANDERSON.PDF
Here's a Russian technical paper
http://www.campublic.co.uk/science/publications/JConfAbs/5/533.pdf
Modern herbal remedy sites suggest that alchemists knew about this
property
of horsetail ferns
http://www.mylifepath.com/article/tnpherb/100748057
Best
Norman
thing for a living. It would be easier to ask if there was anything I
haven't done for a living. Back in the heady days of ICI there is
sometimes a slack period in between one project finishing and another
starting and I was seconded to a section that was humorously known as
'Ore Treatment' Mines get along fine for years working a discrete
lode until one day they reach the limits of the field and other metals
appear which screws up their extraction process. Our job was to get rid
of all the nasties and sell the mine huge quantities of expensive ICI
chemicals to put things right. The reason copper, silver and gold are
used as coinage metals, is because they, silver and gold particularly
are not so common and are particularly un-reactive. As you say, cyanide
is one of the few reagents to complex with gold. Samples of the ore
were put into a rod mill with fairly conc cyanide solution and left
running overnight. Then the complex was reduced to the metal. The South
African Ashanti and Chamber mines were the only profitable ones in the
world at the time but with scarcity driving the price up, less
profitable mines are gaining importance. Now, with more efficient
extraction processes, spoil heaps are being reprocessed. There is also
one processing company in the world, who are tackling the heavy metal
extraction process by reduction with pure hydrogen (padded with
nitrogen). I don't think I want to do that. Just as an aside, the
reason cyanide is poisonous is because it forms a stronger bond with
iron than haemoglobin so the oxygen extracted by the lungs doesn't go
anywhere and death occurs by asphyxiation. This reaction only occurs in
an acid environment so if you have an alkaline stomach caused by say a
peptic ulcer as did Rasputin then the cyanide has no effect.
Interesting huh!
The idea of Proctor and Gamble getting into this field is even more
interesting. Why do things not surprise me anymore. If you find such a
plant Drew you can buy the Iranian's family pig for a handful of
seeds. But what you need to concentrate metals from seawater is a
filter pump extractor. I think they are called mussels and oysters (I
will bet you are sorry I told you that now).
I am getting bored with lecture so I am going to stop it now.
Best
Drew
more on the subject than I. The 'lecture' was interesting.
Dunno about yourselves, but I have no problem envisaging manufacturing
of the future being largely by nanobot type things. Possibly DNA based,
possibly not, but billions of autonomous 'organisms' co-operating
to perform a specific function. Everything being self repairing,
mineral extraction too. Way to go.
Best
Jerry
I've a hunch that this sort of thing could be combined with
desalination
- two birds with one stone