possibly the world's largest deposits of rare metal found in Czech mountains

Czech Radio reported today that German scientists have discovered deposits of the rare metallic element indium in the Krušné Hory mountains on the north-western Czech border. The deposits could turn out to be the world’s largest known single reserve.

This would be good news if the Czech Republic could reap some yummy profit from the proceeds and if mining could be done with minimal impact on the environment.

Indium is a soft, easily fusible metal, chemically similar to tin, but more closely resembling zinc. It is widely used in the manufacturing of electronics, particularly in the computer industry for LCD and LED, plasma flat screen displays and in thin film solar-cell technology.

"As indium metal is extremely rare," states the Czech Radio report, "it also extremely expensive, currently selling for around 700 euros a kilo – a ten-fold increase on prices a mere five years ago."

It is estimated that the extraction could begin in approximately three years, provided the price of zinc and tin, the other metals with which the indium is mixed, goes up, as it is predicted to do.

I am imagining the investors lining up at the speed of lightning. My prediction is that many of the local residents would likely support the drilling, if it gets the go-ahead, hoping for job offers, because the north-western region of the country has a solid history of mining and the largest unemployment rate of the entire Czech Republic (more than 10%).

Dr. Thomas Seifert, a member of the German team from the Freiberg Mining Academy that surveyed the site, was quoted in the article as saying that underground mining technologies "are so highly developed that the environmental impact is very, very low.”

Indeed, in my search around for information on the toxicity of indium, I have found that indium is considered a non-toxic substance, though some indium compounds are highly toxic.

According to a 2004 U.S. Department of the Interior Geological Survey, "metallic indium and most of its compounds are relatively inert and are not considered to be hazardous in industrial use. Exceptions include nitrogen dioxide, which may explode in the presence of indium. Some of the advanced semiconductor materials that contain indium must be considered toxic, not for their indium content, but for the antimony and arsenic components of the compounds, which include gallium indium arsenide phosphide, indium-gallium arsenide, and indium antimonide."

The most problematic aspect of indium production is the use of highly toxic chemicals in the extraction process. China, for example, which is the world's second largest indium producer after Canada, has a history of spills of toxic waste from the process of extracting indium from zinc slag. Though well-designed and carefully managed processing plants have the capability of recycling much of the material used for the refining, accidents and leaks can happen and waste still exists. We in the Czech Republic don't have a very good history of environmental conscientiousness on the part of industry. That coupled with corruptibility is not a very good combination.

Other issues that come to mind as far as building and operating mines are environmental destruction as well as excessive uses of resources, including energy and water for the extraction process. Furthermore there is the pollution resulting from the release of sulfur dioxide into the air by the processing plant. More research for on the environmental impacts of mining to come.

the president: an envirosceptic Czech maverick?

The Czech president Václav Klaus seems to revel in being controversial. Perhaps he thinks of himself as the "Czech maverick?"

Over the last two years, Klaus has received a lot of attention for his highly publicized opposition (and book!) to what he calls the "myth of global warming." The climate skeptic he is, Klaus delivered a keynote speech at the international envirosceptic gathering in March 2008 in New York, the International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by a plethora of international right-wing free-market advocate think-tanks such as the National Center for Policy Analysis, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Austrian Hayek Institute.

American media, including conservative talk show host Glenn Beck almost wet their pants at the pleasure of featuring a climate skeptic and free-market advocate who happens to be the head of a state.

The previous year, Klaus also addressed the delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference, which caused some Czechs (including the author of this blog) some embarrassment.

About environmentalism, Klaus says that it "is a metaphysical ideology and a worldview that has absolutely nothing in common with science and the climate." According to Klaus, environmentalism "is a new anti-individualistic, pseudo-collectivistic ideology based on putting nature and environment and their supposed protection and preservation before and above freedom."

Global warming is, asserts Klaus, "similar to the Avian flu propaganda, the Y2K propaganda, the end of resources propaganda, the overpopulation propaganda."

Klaus worries: "A rational response to any danger depends on the size and probability of the eventual risk and on the magnitude of the costs of its avoidance. I feel obliged to say that – based on my knowledge – I find the risk too small and the costs of eliminating it too high."

His main fears seem to stem from his libertarian ideas of an unrestricted market, which "ideologies" such as environmentalism threaten. In a nut shell, he clearly advocates the tired old 'profits before people and the planet' ideology which is precisely that which got the planet as sick as it is today.

He, like many Czechs I know, refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the environmental degradation that plagues the world. "Nature is powerful. It will come back and regenerate itself," argue so many Czechs I have spoken to. But do they not realize that extinctions caused by human activity are taking place at at least 100 to 1,000 times nature's normal rate between great extinction episodes? Do they not see that climate change is a life-or-death matter for not only animals but whole communities of people who are fleeing their ancestral lands because of the quickly melting polar ice caps and rising ocean levels?

Sometimes I laugh at the foolishness of the global warming deniers, but other times the gravity of the matter sinks in and Mr. Maverick et al are just not so funny anymore.