Prominent South African anti-mining campaigner assassinated.

Police in Eastern Cape, South Africa, after Sikhosiphi 'Bazooka' Rhadebe, a prominent opponent of the Xolobeni Mine Project, was shot dead in front of his wife and son on Tuesday 22 March 2016. Rhadebe, who was chairman of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, was killed by two men who arrived at his home claiming to be police officers. The men shot him eight times before fleeing. Rhadebe's wife and son are being treated for shock.

 Sikhosiphi Rhadebe negotiating with police officers at a demonstration in 2008. John GI Clarke/GroundUp.

The Xolobeni Mine Project is a project of Transworld Energy & Minerals, a South African subsidiary of the Australian company Mineral Commodities. The project hopes to excavate 348.7 million tonnes of ore-sand from the Wild Coast region of the Eastern Cape, yielding about 5% titanium. However the project would involve the relocation of about a thousand people, and affects an area considered to be considered to be part of their cultural heritage by many Xhosa people.

The Amadiba Crisis Committee was formed by residents opposed to the project in 2007, and has repeatedly complained of intimidation by supporters of the mine. In May 2015 six people were arrested after a Transworld Energy & Minerals fired a gun over the heads of protesters, and four men, one identified as an employee of the company, are awaiting trial after an incident in December in which several protesters were attacked and intimidated.

Members of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, including Rhadebe himself, have claimed for some time that a hit list of prominent protesters had been drawn up by opponents of the mine, a claim which now appears to have been vindicated. However the chairman of Mineral Commodities, Mark Caruso, has denied that the company is in any way involved with the violence and has promised to co-operate fully with any investigation.

See also...

Union official assassinated at Lonmin's Marikana Platinum Mine.                                 A fifty-three year old woman, identified as a shop steward from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), was shot outside her home, close to the Lonmin operated Marikana Platinum Mine, at...

Shooting at Lonmin's Marikana Platinum Mine.                                                                A 49 year old man, believed to be a team leader for the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), was shot dead...

Two union officials shot at Lonmin Platinum Mine in Marikana, South Africa.                     Two union officials have been shot, one fatally, in an incident at the Lonmin-owned Marikana Platinum Mine in South Africa...

Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.

 

Three people hospitalized following titanium tetrachloride leak in Quebec.

Three people required hospital treatment and three factories and about fifteen homes were evacuated following an incident in which about a ton of the chemical titanium tetrachloride was spilled at a factory in Varennes, Quebec, on Saturday 21 March 2015. The incident occurred at about 10.00 am local time at the Kronos owned Varennes Plant, and resulted in the production of a large cloud of toxic gas as the chemical reacted with the atmosphere. People were allowed to return to their homes early on Sunday, after the majority of the spilled chemical was transfered to a secure area, though a 400 m exclusion zone around the site is still in place, and nearby roads remain closed.

Toxic fumes issuing from the Kronos Varennes Plant on Saturday 21 March 2015. TVA News.

Titanium tetrachloride is an intermediate product in the production of titanium metal and titanium dioxide. It is produced by passing chlorine gas over crushed titanium ores at high temperatures (typically in excess of 900°C). It can then be reacted with magnesium to produce pure titanium or converted to titanium dioxide by a process of hydrolysis. However it needs to be kept out of contact with the atmosphere, as it will react with any humidity in the atmosphere forming clouds of hydrochloric acid, which appears to have been the case at the Varennes Plant, although the speed at which this reaction occurs is largely governed by temperature, so the scale of the incident may have been minimized by the low temperatures prevalent in the area at the moment.

See also...

Toxic cloud over Barcelona.

Residents of five towns in the Province of Barcelona, Spain, were forced to stay inside for much of the morning of Thursday 12 February 2015, after an explosion at the Simarsa chemicals plant  resulted in...

Natural gas emissions in Boston, Massachusetts.

Methane (CH₄) is considered to be a serious atmospheric pollutant, both for its role as a greenhouse gas and its immediate effect on the area where it is released, where it can contribute to raised ozone levels at ground level, which is harmful to human health. It is currently calculated that methane is present in...

Atmospheric trace metals in the Bushveld Igneous Complex.

The Bushveld Igneous Complex is the world’s most productive area for platinum group metals, responsible for about 80% of global production, as well as having significant reserves of many other metals. It covers an area of 66 000 km² across the North West, Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces of South...

Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.

Could we mine the moon for titanium?

This week scientists at the joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in Nantes, revealed the discovery of extensive titanium reserves of the moon, with widespread deposits of the mineral ilmenite containing up to 10% titanium; ilmenite on Earth typically contains only 1% titanium. The research was presented by Mark Robinson of Arizona State University and Brett Denevi of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was based upon findings made by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter; which was able to make a spectrographic analysis of rocks on the lunar surface, by calibrating the spectral signal to rocks brought back from the surface by the Apollo 17 Astronauts and images made of the landing site by the Hubble Space Telescope.

A Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image of the moon.

This has lead to widespread speculation that we might mine titanium on the moon. Titanium is a valuable metal, lightweight, strong and corrosion resistant. It used in surgical implants, aircraft and high technology. The lunar reserves have been shown to be much richer than those on Earth, and in a form that is also rich in oxygen, something that any lunar colony would require.

However while titanium is valuable, this does not mean that it is automatically valuable enough to justify the expense of a lunar colony. Titanium is the ninth most abundant element on Earth, and the seventh most abundant metal. We extract about 90 000 tonnes of the metal from the Earth's surface, but there are thought to be workable reserves of about 600 000 000 tonnes; that is to say at current rates of extraction reserves will last for another 666 years, assuming no increase in recycling, nor any better replacement material being found. Resources that were valuable in 1345 are not necessarily the same ones considered valuable now; Europeans never hailed the discovery of America as a potential source of cheap thatch for their roofs. As such it is probable that any successful future lunar colony might choose to mine titanium for its own use, but highly unlikely that one would ever be established for the express purpose of titanium mining.

See also Is the Moon younger than we think? When Moons Collide and Volcanoes on the far side of the Moon.