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?
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
I call marketing stunt. Most unlikely not a truthful representation of what to expect when doing it yourself.
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.
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.
Wiktionary: From Middle English lymail, from Anglo-Norman limaille, from Latin limare, a form of limo (“to file”); see further there.
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.
Hilarious — I guess big tech companies weren't the first to offer employees on-site laundry after all!
> 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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
This made me wonder what the health benefits of having lungs of gold might be.
Remains to be seen, perhaps?
Edit: oops, never mind
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.
__
† 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.
Great parties in the 00’s!
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_von_Laue#Post-war
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_von_Laue#Hidden_Nobel_pr...
[1] https://thegoldcenter.com/how-much-gold-is-in-a-dental-crown... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
These people buy millions per day in gold, I’m sure if it was profitable they wouldn’t turn it away.
You can try it though, go to all the gold stores in your area and tell them you’ll buy all the teeth they bring in.
Worth noting (unless someone else already did) that the UK program that technically started before the Manhattan Project was called 'Tube Alloys'.
Isn’t this exactly what should be looked into? Find weak point and hit them. Germanys ball bearing plants and oil refineries got targeted this way.
It would be about $2.75 per day, an insignificant amount, but it's much worse than that because you earn it all at once at the end of the ten-year period. So you're making (almost) $2.75 a day toward the end of the period, and a lot less than that toward the beginning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton
we also often encounter a "f*ck ton" or even a "metric f*ck ton". these are usually informal units related to the number of things (especially annoying things) rather than strictly weight.
Similar if the Axis had large-scale resistance forces operating in America, able to sustain at-scale acts of industrial sabotage.
But the Axis already knew that America had a huge copper industry. With no way to affect that industry, at scale - long lists of American copper mines, refining facilities, factories, etc. were no more valuable to the Axis than collections of apple pie recipes.
The oil campaign OTOH, worked out well.
I'd guess actually going after stuff like wire/brass casing production, while it could have an impact, the 'ROI' is likely lower than more important logistics meta-targets (i.e. oil and gas production and transport infra/equip) and those are far easier to 're-boot-strap', one can theoretically draw copper wire from their garage with a reasonable base starting piece and draw jig/rig.
Also, like bearings, it's easier to 'surplus'. Surplus Oil sitting in a field or penetrable location? Obvious easy pickings. Stockpiled wire? I mean you could but frankly even if you burned/melted all the wires someone can just collect it and re-make wire. It's not like oil where the resource gets completely destroyed in the process.
(Ammo depots, OTOH, would make sense.)
I use them most of time now. We are getting there slowly.
Most people would be amazed at how little, when not in a shop under bright lights, jewelry is actually worth. Let’s just say they aren’t selling gold, they are selling emotions and hype. And many customers get extremely angry when they go to resell and find out how little it’s worth. You’ll be lucky to get a tenth of what you paid for the stones.
Source; my wife ran the biggest gold buying store in northern LA county for a few years.
Gold, Silver etc have a daily published value, and you can expect a number close to that (allowing for margin). But "precious stones" are really not all that precious, or rare.
When selling (to a dealer) you discover the margins they make- often upwards of 90% (as my father discovered selling jewelry he inherited.) To be fair, crafting takes significant labor and most old jewelry has to be melted down and recrafted.
None of this negates the significance of one person giving another jewelry. That adds substantial sentimental value which is what makes them valuable at all.
(It does make me smile though when movies use uncut diamonds as some sort of compact currency...)
My pet theory is that those are all effectively product placements; i.e. they get paid to portray diamonds in the movie as valuable.
After a while she just kind of knew what to look out for. How people presented the goods, how they acted, etc.
The most shocking part to me, was how many 80s-90s celebs would bring in gold to sell. I guess times get rough.
Gold teeth are worth the absolute least.
Boots, not clothes. Diamonds are so sharp that they easily get lodged in rubber soles. And then fall out when you walk.
One would think diamond merchants would take the time to be equally careful, if not moreso.
But also, these tiny stones really aren't worth much. What you're asking is like Home Depot making sure to account for every single nut & bolt so none are stolen or lost. It would cost far more in time & labor then what you'd get back in return.
And the small diamonds are still pretty cheap. He said about $100 per carat of small diamonds. It's not surprising that they're more casual with this inventory.
> Over six days, he says, he collected enough gold for two sales totaling $819 on 47th Street.
>The SI comprises a coherent system of units of measurement starting with seven base units, which are the second (symbol s, the unit of time), metre (m, length), kilogram (kg, mass), ampere (A, electric current), kelvin (K, thermodynamic temperature), mole (mol, amount of substance), and candela (cd, luminous intensity).
and gram is some random word you made up, with no definition under SI.
There is no logical difference between the definition you gave, and an alternative definition that says "the gram is defined by setting the Planck constant h to 6.62607015×10−31 J⋅s (J = g⋅m2⋅s−2), given the definitions of the metre and the second", and then defining 1 kg = 1000 g. Which is why I'm asking what this distinction actually means, if anything.
It meant something that feels more real when the kilogram was defined as the mass of a physical reference kilogram object in a vault in Paris, but that changed a few years ago.
Don't you mean a millikilogram (mkg)?
Some gets resold as is (there's a (limited) market for vintage jewelry) but most is reworked. And of course that reworking takes significant time and skill.
That was an unexpected kicker. I suspect you or your spouse must have a good story about shady people trying to work that angle.
Just messy business.
If it’s in any form but rounds or bars, it’ll need to be melted down which has a cost. So it can be made into a form that can be resold closer to spot value.
The margin are actually even better if you melt them down. it’s really hard to buy physical gold at spot, single ounces/grams go for a few points higher.