sigh
This is it.
I am standing at the place
where the beryllium was mined for the James Webb Space Telescope.
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Let’s take a step back. I travelled just south of Salt Lake City
City to a town called Delta, Utah.
Welp, here we are
what is it, 5:30 in the morning. And then back on the road the next morning
as the sun rose up to meet the beryllium miners all in my quest to find out…
Where does beryllium come from?
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So Utah is home to many valuable materials
copper, magnesium, uranium, gold and silver.
But most of the world's beryllium is mined here. And engineers
chose beryllium for Webb's mirrors because it is lightweight, it is strong
and it is dimensionally stable. So that means
means that it is not going to warp when operating at really cold temperatures.
What even is even here?
As we drove down into the pit, learned that we were in fact
fact driving on the beryllium. This rock looks
nothing like metal.
Where is th beryllium? How does this
turn into this? I of course needed
to speak to an expert, and he came in the form of the VP of operations – Greg Gregory.
We are actually standing on the beryllium ore seam.
Beryllium is in the volcanic ash dust.
It was hydrothermally deposited millions of years ago
and then coved by volcanic rock. We have to remove the volcanic rock
on top of the ore seam and then use a scraper and a bulldozer
to extract the ore that we're standing on top of.
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90 percent of the beryllium that was mined in the world last year came from this deposit.
Now let me clue you into how rare this
this metal is. This area has most of the world's known beryllium,
but the highest concentration runs through a 10-foot tall
diagonal ribbon well below the surface of the ground.
The ore concentration is
0.25 percent beryllium.
That means, in a ton of ore, there is about 5 pounds
of beryllium.
So to get to this point we had to remove 400 feet of rock
to get to the ore seam. Once the ore is extracted, it goes
through a bunch processing to extract the pure beryllium
Then the powder beryllium is pressed into block ready for machining
Webb's mirrors started out as solid
5 foot tall, 5 foot wide and 2-inch-thick blocks of beryllium.
But in order to machine those blocks
millions of pounds of rock were removed.
It comes to about 4 tons of rock for every pound of beryllium.
That is a lot of work
for one remarkable metal.
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