Chapter 184, Moon Mining

"Bang!"

At the Tanegashima Space Center far away on Earth, Ichiro Yagyu has already dropped several of his beloved antique porcelains, but his anger is getting stronger and stronger.

He had already chosen Yunhai as the location of his lunar base, and Yunhai had long been regarded as his own possession, but now Li Fu's Fuyun Group has taken the lead, and the entire lunar plan has been completely disrupted. All subsequent related plans must be adjusted, and other areas must be selected to build their own lunar bases.

"Yagyu-kun, the atmosphere has no effect now. What we have to do now is to readjust the plan and quickly build a lunar base on the moon. Otherwise, there will be fewer and fewer good places on the surface of the moon. I heard that Uncle Sam is also preparing to build another lunar sub-base in the near future."

The governor Yuta on the side was very rational. He knew that now was not the time to be in a bad mood. With the strong strength of Fuyun Group in space and the help of the Chinese government, building a base on the moon was a very simple and easy thing. It did not require detailed planning like himself, and it would take a long time.

I didn't receive any news in advance. I didn't expect that Fuyun Group suddenly had the urge to build a lunar base on the moon, and they just happened to choose Yunhai, occupying the place that Jiaobenji had chosen in advance.

"Huh!"

"Goshou-kun is right. Now is not the time to be angry. Our lunar base plan must be implemented as soon as possible. If it doesn't work, we will have no place to stay on the front of the moon."

"Goshou-kun, please, please modify the plan as soon as possible and then execute it."

Yagyu Ichiro breathed heavily, then nodded slowly.

"Hey, the other problems are not big. The key now is that the astronauts of Fuyun Group say they need to rest for a day every time they go to space. As far as I know, when the Fuyun Group's space shuttle is most frequent, it can perform hundreds of round-trip missions to space in a day. If we want to implement the lunar base plan as soon as possible, we must deal with them."

Gomori Kota frowned. Now all aspects of Jiaobenji are like a machine with a spring tightened. Everything is done in a hurry, but when it comes to the last link of going to space, the astronauts sent by Fuyun Group always drag their feet and always find various reasons to delay. Jiaobenji is so anxious that he has no way to deal with it.

"Tell Nishimura Jiro that no matter what method is used, whether it is money or beauty, they must be dealt with. Once every two days is too little, not to mention hundreds of times a day. Now they are treated like masters. It is not too much to go back and forth to space several times a day."

Speaking of this, Yagyu Ichiro was very angry again. He felt that the aerospace plane he bought at a high price had nothing to do with him. Everything had to be agreed by the astronauts and security personnel sent by Fuyun Group before it could be executed. Various delays occurred.

"Hey!"

...

More than 300,000 kilometers away on the moon, here at the Yunhai Base on the moon, more than a dozen large "Hercules" aerospace planes transported a large amount of materials every day. The scale of the Yunhai Moon Base is getting bigger and bigger, and living areas, scientific research areas, factory areas, agricultural areas, airport areas, etc., are rapidly forming one by one.

At this time, here in the factory area of ​​the Yunhai Base, Cao Haitao, the person in charge of the Yunhai Base, is directing the base workers to carry out lunar mining.

A very large lunar engineering vehicle, which is more than ten meters high, is an enlarged version of a large excavator with a huge excavation claw, which is specially used to dig rocks, soil, etc. on the moon.

Inside the lunar engineering vehicle, Cao Haitao, wearing a space suit, connected to the virtual machine for command, and the huge lunar miner Han Dafei was concentrating on driving the engineering vehicle out.

"Everyone, follow us. This is our first time to mine on the moon. Try to dig out the first bucket of gold smoothly."

Following Cao Haitao's command, more than a dozen large lunar transport vehicles followed behind. More than a dozen vehicles drove on the desolate lunar surface. Their destination was a mining area only 5 kilometers away from the base.

The most valuable mineral on the moon is rare earth ore, and so is Cao Haitao's target. In fact, the moon is full of lunar basalts rich in rare earth ore. Cao Haitao's target is a mountain range more than 200 meters high. Almost the entire mountain range is made of basalt. The rare earths contained are amazing, and they are rare rare earth ore, which is of great value.

"Brother Tao, you are a great scientist. Can you tell us what is going on with rare earth? How are they mined from stones and soil?"

As they walked and chatted along the way, Han Dafei couldn't help asking Cao Haitao. Han Dafei was a college student who had just graduated not long ago, but he studied a major that had nothing to do with mining.

"Rare earth is a general term for 17 metal elements in the periodic table, including lanthanide elements, scandium and yttrium. There are currently 250 rare earth minerals in nature. The first person to discover rare earth was the Finnish chemist Gadolin, who separated the first rare earth 'element' - yttrium earth from a heavy ore shaped like asphalt in 1794. Because there were fewer rare earth minerals discovered in the 18th century, only a small amount of water-insoluble oxides could be produced by chemical methods at that time. Historically, this oxide was habitually called 'earth', hence the name rare earth."

"Rare earth mining methods can be generally divided into three categories, namely acid method, alkali method and chlorination decomposition method. Acid decomposition is further divided into hydrochloric acid decomposition, sulfuric acid decomposition and hydrofluoric acid decomposition; alkali decomposition is further divided into sodium hydroxide decomposition or sodium hydroxide melting or soda roasting method..."

"In fact, the value of rare earth itself is already quite high, and the value of a single high-purity rare earth element is thousands of times higher, or even Tens of thousands of times. Although China exported a lot of rare earths in the past, it was only primary products at a very low price. Instead, we had to buy high-purity rare earths from Europe and the United States, and we were fleeced by them. "

"Brother Tao, can't we extract a single high-purity rare earth element ourselves?"

"It is relatively complicated and difficult to separate and extract a single pure rare earth element from the mixed rare earth compounds obtained by decomposing rare earth concentrates. There are two main reasons for this. One is that the physical and chemical properties of lanthanide elements are very similar. , most rare earth ion radii are between two adjacent elements, very close, and are in a stable trivalent state in aqueous solution. Rare earth ions have a strong affinity for water, and because they are protected by hydrates, their chemical properties are very similar, making separation and purification extremely difficult. "

"Second, there are many impurity elements associated with the mixed rare earth compounds obtained after the decomposition of rare earth concentrates (such as uranium, thorium, niobium, tantalum, titanium, zirconium, iron, calcium, silicon, fluorine, phosphorus, etc.). Therefore, in the process of separating rare earth elements, not only the separation of these dozen rare earth elements with extremely similar chemical properties must be considered, but also Consider the separation between rare earth elements and the impurity elements produced by their companions. "

"Does our company have the purification technology now? Brother Tao, we can't let the Europeans and Americans shear our wool with scissors. "

"Of course we have mastered it. Now it's their turn to shear their wool. Haven't you seen that our space planes sell for trillions of dollars each?"

Cao Haitao also agreed very readily. Anyway, it was boring on the road, and chatting with each other could quickly kill time. Along the way, everyone started to popularize rare earth mines. After chatting and chatting, they soon arrived at the mining area.

"Brothers, let's get started!"

Han Dafei roared through the intercom, driving the machine with a huge claw to dig on the hill of the moon. The basalt on the moon was shattered, and he grabbed a handful of basalt, and then turned around and loaded the basalt and soil onto the engineering vehicle following behind.

More than a dozen engineering vehicles were fully loaded in less than 30 minutes, and the hill in front of them seemed to have not changed at all. The loss of this little mass was nothing to it.

Ten minutes later, everyone drove the lunar engineering vehicle back to the lunar base, and one lunar vehicle after another poured all the basalt and soil on it into the smelting line.

As the rotating belt rotated, the mined basalt first entered the crushing workshop, where pieces of basalt were crushed into powder, and then entered the smelting furnace to start the separation of rare earth elements.

The rare earth ore selected by Cao Haitao is the dysprosium and terbium rare earth ore with relatively high value among the rare earths. The value of these two rare earth ores has always been relatively high, especially the high-purity and high-quality rare earth ores, which are of very high value.

A few hours later, Cao Haitao, Han Dafei and others looked eagerly at the separation furnace. Dozens of tons and hundreds of tons of rocks, soil, etc. were loaded in front, but the rare earth ore smelted out in the end was pitifully small, only less than a few kilograms.

"Brother Tao? Is this silvery white rare earth?"

"Yes, this is rare earth."

"Why is there only so little? We put hundreds of tons of basalt in, and only a little came out. Our boss will lose money."

"Only a little? Do you know how much this is worth? It costs hundreds of millions. I didn't expect that the rare earth ore on the moon is so rich that so much rare earth can be extracted from any basalt."

Cao Haitao looked at the final product and touched his chin, shocked by the rich rare earth ore on the moon. You know, what comes out is high-purity rare earth elements, which are very valuable.

PS: Please vote, please!

I don't know if you have seen rare earth? I grew up playing with rare earth when I was a child. The mountains near my hometown contain rare earths. There are all kinds of random openings and mining. The locals didn't make any money, but the green mountains and clear waters were destroyed. Alas! With a long sigh, this is something Lao Niu has seen since he was a child. The villagers sold their mountains to outsiders for mining, while they themselves went out to work. It is really a pity that they are poor all their lives despite having mountains of gold and silver. There are too many such cases in China.