Mountain Pass, California
Mountain Pass is a settlement in San Bernardino County in the U.S. state of California, near the border with the state of Nevada. It is located at Clark Mountain in the south of the Mescal Range at an altitude of 1443 meters on Interstate Highway 15, about 50 kilometers northeast of Baker and 80 kilometers southwest of Las Vegas.
Mine
In Mountain Pass is an important, but long time inactive mine to reduce Seltenenerdmetallen, which is part of Molycorp, Inc.. It covers around 22 hectares in surface mining. The mine was shut down in 2002 after environmental regulations after a serious accident in 1998 did not implement profitable. At that time, approximately one billion liters of mine was to radioactive and chemically contaminated waste water from leaking sump in a dry salt lake at the edge of the Mojave National Preserve east expired. Since 2010 she is back in service.
The carbonatite complex was discovered in April 1949 almost by accident when two prospectors with a borrowed Geiger counter found a site where they suspected radioactive uranium. However, ore samples were Bastnäsit. One of the two explorers made the Molybdenum Corporation of America 's attention to the Fund and worked as a metallurgist for the company later. In February 1950 MCA acquired the mining rights. In the adjacent area was found by the United States Geological Survey a much larger deposit of non-radioactive Bastnäsit. This deposit was located in the area of a small gold mine, who bought MCA together with the rights and the permanent establishment. The company acquired as a result still more adjacent properties. MCA changed its name in 1974 in Molycorp, was purchased in 1977 by Unocal and went in 2005 to the Chevron Corporation.
Molycorp dominated the market for rare earth elements during the next twenty years, the entire world production of europium has been for decades won at Mountain Pass.
The ore from the mine, which consists mainly of Bastnäsit and partly from monazite, which contains cerium (49 percent), lanthanum (33 percent ), neodymium (12.5 percent), praseodymium (4 percent), samarium (1 percent) and other higher rare earth metals. This was previously digested using sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, ammonia, sodium hydroxide and other chemicals, resulting in a large amount of waste water.
To reduce Due to increased world prices and the dependency of China, 2008, to a newly created company bought back under the name of the Molycorp mine from Chevron. 2010, production was recorded at a low level again and started to expand. The full performance is to be achieved by the end of 2013. Molycorp intends in the future to shed light on new chemical technologies, alone on the basis of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide solution to convert and thus to reduce the amount of waste water significantly. The resulting salts are supposed to be doing back cleaved by chlorine alkali electrolysis and partially reinstated.