Thoughts for December 11, 2022
Good evening. This week’s topics are artisanal mining, quantum computing, and fusion.
Artisanal Mining
Artisanal mining (ASM) is small-scale mining, done outside of the purview of a major company, typically by individuals or small groups, at a subsistence level, in an informal way, and with low-tech tools. These are general characteristics; I am not aware of a formal, rigorous definition.
I found this report from a few years ago to be a good introduction to the concepts and some basic statistics around ASM. To illustrate the scale, the report estimates that 20% of gold, 80% (!) of sapphire, 20% of diamond, 26% of tantalum (an important element for electronics and other industries), and 25% of tin is produced by ASM. The report says that 15-20% of overall nonfuel mineral production comes from ASM; I’m not sure the context of this figure but I guess it is by dollar value.
The report states that 40.5 million people worldwide work in ASM (as of 2017), compared to 7 million (as of 2013) in industrial mining. That would mean that industrial mining has 23-33 times the labor productivity of ASM. This World Bank assessment puts the numbers of people in ASM much higher at 100 million, but this is disputed.
Another interesting statistic, which surprised me, is that the number of people employed in artisanal mining has grown significant in recent years: from 6 million in 1993 to 13 million in 1999 to 30 million in 2014 to 40.5 million in 2017.
I don’t have many figures on relative environmental impacts, but from the labor productivity figures alone, I’d have to guess that ASM imposes much greater health and injury costs, per unit ore recovered, than industrial mining. The report says that ASM is the world’s largest source of mercury emissions, which is most associated with gold mining. ASM tends to be much less regulated than industrial mining, especially when industrial mining is conducted in countries with strict environmental standards.
The word “artisanal” evokes positive associations, as in artisanal cheeses, but I doubt that any readers of this blog are engaged in artisanal mining or wish to be. Still, we ought not condemn it too heavily. As the report explains, ASM is most often an income supplement on top of subsistence agriculture, and a valuable lifeline for many of the world’s poorest. And as demand for minerals continues to grow under the needs of a clean energy system, ASM fulfills an important need in the world economy, at least for the time being.
Most ASM is not associated with violence, and we should be careful about such stereotypes, but in some areas this happens. Since 2004, the Kivu region in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been in almost continuous ethnic violence. How the conflict started, how it perpetuates, and how to resolve it are important questions that cannot be addressed now, but the region’s mineral wealth has been flagged as a major factor. The dynamic of conflict minerals, as described by the development economist Paul Collier, is that they become an important source of revenue for combatants, and mineral wealth becomes a spoil to fight over. This can be seen as a variation of the resource curse. But the article I linked to, as well as this one, dispute the importance of mineral wealth in perpetuating the conflict.
One of the provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act designates four minerals mined in Kivu—tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold—as “conflict minerals” and requires producers of these minerals to certify that they do not contribute to the conflict in Kivu. I expect that this regulation misunderstands the nature of the Kivu conflict and, well-intentioned though it may be, is unlikely to make a noticeable contribution toward resolution.
Conflict minerals are also associated with diamonds, particularly after the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. The effort to facilitate a legitimate diamond trade, while preventing the funding of warfare and terrorism, has been the Kimberly Process for certification of conflict-flee diamonds. Assessments on the effectiveness of the Kimberly Process are mixed but mostly negative.
Quantum Computing
In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report on the state of quantum computing. The field is moving quickly, but the material in the report in general enough that it remains fresh. It is a long read, but I found it to be a useful, layperson-friendly introduction to the field.
Quantum computing is a method of computing that takes advantage of quantum entanglement, and thus for some problems allows (in theory) computational power that is far in excess of what would be possible through classical computing. It will be a while—the report says 10+ years, and nothing I have seen since then makes me think otherwise—before there are useful quantum computers in operation. Even then, they are most likely to play a niche role and be accessible through the cloud, while our laptops and smartphones will remain as classical computers.
Two potential applications stand out. First, quantum computers could excel in simulations relevant to problems in chemistry, biology, and physics, and thus be useful for materials development, among other areas. Second, using Shor’s algorithm or Grover’s algorithm, a quantum computer could defeat a large share of modern cryptography, creating a security need to develop and widely implement quantum-safe encryption before a quantum computer is developed.
Shortly after the report, engineers from Google announced they had achieved “quantum supremacy”. This means that a quantum computer can perform a task that no classical computer could perform in reasonable time. But researchers from IBM disputed this claim (it should be noted that IBM develops hardware with which a quantum computer would compete). The problem with quantum supremacy is that it is a slippery target. Aside from the vagueness of “reasonable time”, classical computer hardware continues to advance, and it is seldom proven that the best known classical algorithm for a problem is the best possible. Since 2019, there have been at least two more claims of quantum supremacy, but so far no claim is universally accepted.
There is quite a bit that I don’t understand, but this appears to be an area where the excitement outpaces the potential of the field. Both the American and the Chinese governments are investing heavily in quantum computing and making this a flagship research enterprise, yet the NAS report portrays (in not so many words) quantum computing as a speculative endeavor that will have a few niche applications at best.
Fusion Power
Today there have been news articles that the National Ignition Facility achieved breakeven with fusion, that the reactor allegedly produces more energy than what was put into it.
I say “allegedly” because, though true in some sense, this milestone is not particularly relevant. In a commercially useful fusion reactor, the reaction needs to produce enough energy so that, when converted to electricity, it can power the laser and other machinery needed to keep the reaction going.
Here I’ll refer back to Sabine Hossenfelder’s video last year, where she distinguishes between Q_plasma (the quantity being talked about in the news today) and Q_total, accounting for energy conversion losses that are inevitable. I’ve seen (no link now, sorry) that a Q_plasma of around 10 is needed to get Q_total > 1, at which point we are really getting somewhere.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the National Ignition Facility, which made this achievement, is an inertial confinement project. It was developed with military, not energy production, applications in mind, and most commercial fusion endeavors are based on tokamaks rather than inertial confinement.
Energy breakeven is for fusion what quantum supremacy is for quantum computing. It is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for viability of the technology. It is, nevertheless, an important psychological milestone and one worth celebrating.