Science blog

A Diamond is a mineral made of carbon that is crystallized. In fact a diamond is more than 99.95% pure carbon. The remaining 0.05 percent of the elements often influences the crystal's color and shape. The diamond is also by far the hardest natural substance known to man. Diamonds form between 75 and 120 miles below the earth's surface. Only at these great depths do the necessary temperature and pressure exist to form this unique gem. Diamonds were delivered to the surface by volcanic eruptions. These eruptions occurred over 50 million years ago. Geologists believe that the first delivery occurred more than 2.5 billion years ago. After reaching the surface, some diamonds settled back into their volcanic pipes. Other diamonds were washed hundreds of miles away by floods and rivers. Some diamonds reached the oceans and were washed back onto the beach. The first diamond mines were discovered in India before 500 BC. India has been the world's major supplier of diamonds for over 2,000 years, producing some of the most famous diamonds. Today, India accounts for only a tiny percentage of the world's diamond production. Today's diamond production leaders are currently Australia, Botswana, Russia, South Africa, Zaire and Canada. Before being transformed into a beautiful piece of jewelry, the diamond must undergo several stages. STAGE 1 - MINING The diamonds that made it to the surface were forced up volcanically, through kimberlite pipes. A typical pipe mine consists of a large vertical shaft with tunnels running from the main pipe. The deepest mine runs about 3,500 feet down into the earth. More than 200 tons of rock, gravel and sand need to be blasted, crushed and processed to yield just one carat of gem quality diamonds. Finding diamonds and getting them out of the ground may require the use of jet engines to thaw the frozen ground or to endure the sweltering desert heat. Only about 20% of all rough diamonds are suitable for polishing; the rest are used for industrial purposes. Once the rough is found the diamond's journey begins. STAGE 2 - ROUGH REACHES THE MARKET A large proportion of the world's rough supply finds its way to De Beers' Central Selling Organization (CSO). The rough the CSO buys is sorted into more than 5,000 different categories. Once the rough is sorted and priced, it is sold to manufacturers at sights. There are ten sights a year, each lasting a week. The chosen few afforded the chance to purchase at these sights are called sight holders. The balance of the world's rough supply is sold to private buyers, and some through private auctions. STAGE 3 - MANUFACTURING THE DIAMOND Regardless of the source, all rough eventually finds its way to the cutting centers. Today, the major cutting centers are Antwerp, Israel, Bombay, Johannesburg, and New York. Upon reaching its destination the rough is carefully examined to decide how it should be cut to yield the greatest value. After the stone's shape and size are determined, taking into consideration the rough's shape, as well as the number and position of its internal inclusions, the stone is marked and usually sawed or cleaved. The stone then goes through a series of cutters who each have their own specialty. Finally the diamond is polished and ready for sale. STAGE 4 - THE FINAL JOURNEY After a diamond is manufactured it needs to be sold. For decades diamond manufacturers have sold their cut diamonds to jewelry manufacturers and diamond wholesalers who in turn, sell to jewelry wholesalers and to retail jewelry stores. Today's technology is changing the diamond pipeline. Diamond manufacturers now have a direct link to the final customer. By learning the 4C's and buying only certified diamonds it is possible to purchase the same quality diamond for a significantly lower price, over the internet.

Wolves are a widely studied species in Yellowstone. Since wolves were reintroduced to the park after an absence of almost 80 years, scientists spend a lot of time studying the animals' unique behavior. "Our knowledge of wolves is vast due to decades of research around the world," said Tom Oliff, chief of natural resources. "The ability to oversee wolves in the wild has been challenging and the knowledge gained through direct observations of behavior is invaluable to understanding the species." The best way to study wolf movement is from the air. The Raven's Eye View of Yellowstone is a component of the Aerial Eyes project that is supported by Yellowstone Park Foundation (www.ypf.org) in cooperation with Canon U.S.A. The Eyes on Yellowstone program is made possible by Canon; it provides funding and digital technology to support an array of park resource management and education programs. Using a Canon EOS 20D digital camera body with a 100-400EF lens (f 4.5-5.6) as a scientific tool, wolf biologists Doug Smith and Dan Stahler are changing the way quantitative and qualitative wolf data are gathered and studied. The scientists have documented various behavior-from hunting prey, to raising pups, to interacting with various species throughout the park. The details, however, remain difficult to see with the naked eye, particularly when using the routine monitoring technique of aerial radio tracking from fixed-wing aircraft flying high overhead. The digital equipment has helped revolutionize this research. High-resolution digital photographs that can be taken several hundred feet above ground and later enhanced have, in a short time, opened new windows to studying wolf ecology and behavior. "This is a major breakthrough for wolf research, providing first-of-its-kind results," said Stahler. "Of particular value is the identification of individual wolves and the role each plays in the pack while engaged in different activities. Determining the presence and number of pups in a litter, or whether or not a certain member of the pack is still alive, can now be readily discernable through studying photographs taken with quality digital camera equipment." Digital photography has changed science, and it has allowed Yellowstone scientists to gather data never obtained by any other wolf research project. The combination of digital imaging and enhanced lens quality are key scientific tools to help study and understand wolves. A pack of wolves in Yellowstone is monitored by aircraft equipped with cameras.

We talked to North America’s leading In Situ Leach (ISL) uranium mining engineers, and had them explain exactly how ISL worked. Most of the significant ISL operations in the United States were designed and/or constructed by these engineers. They explained how ISL mining is really just reversing the process of Mother Nature. CLEANING UP THE PROJECT Not so fast. Shipping the uranium out of the ISL plant isn’t the final step. The water has to be cleaned up, the property returned to its original condition. If done properly, then the footprint of the ISL uranium operation should have been nearly erased. In an earlier article, “Wyoming Uranium: Now and the Future,” we talked to Pat Drummond at Smith Ranch about this process: The company is meticulous in restoring the landscape as well. Any restoration work on the surface is called “reclamation.” That can involve farming. “When we start a well field, we have to, by license, remove the topsoil and store it somewhere,” Drummond explained. “When we go back to reclaim the property, we take all the pipes out, we take the houses down, and cut our wells off. It’s all identified. We put an ID marker on the well. In 50 years time, when Farmer Joe comes around and wonders what was there, the state can say, ‘That was a uranium well.’ From the time we’ve stopped mining, we put everything back to normal.” The one item we did not address at the time was cleaning up the water after the orebody has been mined out. Why is restoring the water back to background important? “In the mining process, you’re basically elevating sulfate,” explained Anthony. “You’re also elevating calcium because you’re lowering the pH a little bit, down to 6.5 to 7. Because you run it across the ion exchange circuits, you get a little leakage of chlorides into the lixiviant.” Subsequently, the water will have sulfate, chloride, calcium and bicarbonate circulating within it. “When you add carbon dioxide, you’re forming bicarbonate,” Anthony noted. “These are the major ion groups you are elevating during the mining process.” He also added that in some projects, you may get arsenic, vanadium and/or selenium. “They all go into the solution so that at the end of your mining process, these ions will be elevated above their baseline values.” The water will need to undergo a purification process to return them back to a quality consistent with baseline values.” What does the ISL operator do with the water once the facility has mined out the uranium? There are three options, which we discussed with Glenn Catchpole, who has also set up previous ISL operations. In 1996, Catchpole was the General Manager and Managing Director of the Inkai uranium solution mining project in Kazakhstan. He is currently the Chief Executive of Uranerz Energy. “Here’s my order of priority: If you have a receiver formation for deep disposal on your project, that’s my first choice.” Sometimes, a project may not have access to a deep disposal aquifer, warned Catchpole. The water is sent down the receiver formation, down about 4000 feet. “You’re usually sending this water to a formation that is very briny, a poorer quality than what you’re sending down,” Anthony pointed out. Another option, according to Catchpole, would be operations ponds, or evaporating ponds, where the water is evaporated. A third option is “land applied.” Catchpole explained this was for land application. “You take your waste stream, you treat it to remove the certain level of impurities, according to the government requirement, and then you’re allowed to disperse it on the land surface, as if you were irrigating.” When applied to the land, it is soaking into the land. “It’s growing grass, and it’s going into the groundwater system,” concluded Catchpole, “Whatever water quality standard they allow for you to put that water in the land, they want to ensure it doesn’t accumulate some particular chemical over time that is going to build up and contaminate the land.” Generally, during the restoration process, the water is circulated through the barren orebody about eight times. It’s another instance of pore volumes – eight more times through the sandstone formation. Anthony explained, “Normally, the first pore volume is evacuated and disposed of via a disposal well.” But he warned, “This will cause an inflow of surrounding native water back into the mine zone. The resulting water is pumped to the surface and processed through a reverse osmosis unit.” Anthony compared this to the desalination of seawater. “The reverse osmosis equipment acts like an ‘ion filter,’ allowing pure water to pass through a membrane and filtering out ions of sulfate, calcium, uranium, bicarbonate and so forth,” Anthony explained. Two streams of water are produced by the reverse osmosis unit. One stream is called “product water,” and is normally consistent with drinking water quality. The smaller stream of water is called “brine.” It contains, according to Anthony, “95 percent of all the dissolved ions that were in solution.” He said, “The brine is disposed down a deep well into an underground formation, which is typically not suitable for any use.” CONCLUSION For all the lip service and media attention paid to the environmental movement in terms of financial support, recognition and respect, it is the ISL miner who cares more about the environment, about preserving Mother Nature. Environmentalists remain ignorant of, or care not to publicize, the dangers of coal-fired electrical generation. Mining and burning coal to generate power for industry and residential electricity poses a greater threat to Mother Nature than ISL mining and nuclear power-generated electricity. No more evident a case in point is New Mexico, where the Navajo Nation “banned” uranium mining, because their president was misled by environmentalists in believing ISL uranium mining could pose a threat to groundwater. At the same time, the Navajo Nation enjoys over $100 million in coal royalties each year, as their air is polluted by carcinogens filling their air from coal mining in the San Juan Basin and coal-fired plants, which produce most of their electricity. It is time for the world’s environmentalist movements to wake up and smell the air they are breathing. Unfortunately, ISL uranium mining will not replace conventional uranium mining in many deposits across the world. According to the World Nuclear Association, ISL mining accounted for 21 percent of worldwide uranium mining in 2004. “The overriding constraint of ISL is the technology is only applicable to selected uranium deposits,” Stover cautioned. “It’s those deposits wherein the uranium ore resides in a permeable environment, where you can flow water through the deposit and where you can bring the dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide into contact with the uranium.” Stover explained that, during the evolution of ISL mining, a number of projects failed because the uranium was associated with organic material, was not accessible to the leaching solution, or the uranium was tied up in clays or shale-like material. “They were not able to flow fluid through it,” explained Stover. “The key issue at the onset is a careful characterization of the host environment in which the uranium exists.” The key advantage to ISL is the far lower capital costs to start up a project, compared to the hundreds of millions required for a conventional mining and mill complex. For example, UR-Energy’s William Boberg and Uranerz Energy’s Glenn Catchpole both believe they can install an ISL operation on their Wyoming properties for as little as $10 million. Labor costs are also less. Doug Norris pointed out, “In its heyday, the Highland mine probably had 4,000 working in it.” By comparison, Cameco’s Smith-Highland ranch in Wyoming may soon ramp up to nearly 100 employees. “We’re talking about installing a centralized water treatment plant supported by a large number of water wells, typically completed with PVC,” Stover explained.

The Sun is the centerpiece of our solar system, the gravity force that keeps everything together. Here is an overview of this source of our existence. An Overview of the Sun The Sun is a star, one of billions in the known universe. It is similar to other stars you see in the night sky, but is prominent in our lives because we orbit it once every 365 days. The process pivotal in the creation of the Sun goes on to this very day. Roughly 4.5 billion years ago, a massive gas cloud surrounded by dust began to compress. As one small part gained in density, it started to produce a small gravitational pull. Over time, this sucked the rest of the gas and dust into an increasingly smaller area. Nobody is sure what first set off the gravity movement, but it may have been a supernova. As the disk of material compressed, it created more gravity and sucked in more material. With spin induced, the disk produced heat. Throw in a bit of helium and trace elements and you have a cauldron that eventually became our Sun. The actual process that fuels our Sun is called fusion. Fusion is fueled by the elements of the Sun to create what is essentially a ball of plasma. The atomic elements that act as fuel for this process are hydrogen and helium atoms. Hydrogen makes up roughly 74 percent of the mass of the Sun. Helium makes up roughly 24 percent. The remaining one percent consists of trace elements such as iron. As to pure measurements, the Sun is pretty impressive. It does not have a solid surface, but it is generally considered to have a diameter of 864,900 miles. As a matter of comparison, the Earth has a diameter of some 7,900 miles. Every second, the Sun converts approximately 5 million tons of matter into energy. The outer layer of the sun averages roughly 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at the core of the sun is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. The sun is expected to continue to keep burning for another 4.5 to 5 billion years. Break out the sun block!