New Caledonia unrest pushes nickel sector deeper into crisis
Weeks of unrest in New Caledonia have plunged the archipelago's nickel industry, already on government life support, closer to catastrophe, sector representatives say.
May 28, 2024
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Weeks of unrest in New Caledonia have plunged the archipelago's nickel industry, already on government life support, closer to catastrophe, sector representatives say.
May 28, 2024
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In a discovery that could reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt—which is often mined using child labor—in the batteries that power electric cars and other products, scientists at the University of California, Irvine ...
Jun 14, 2023
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The key to developing an electric vehicle battery that can charge as quickly as it takes to fill a car with gasoline lies within its materials.
Jun 5, 2023
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It's estimated that mining, refining, and processing metals commonly used in construction, referred to as structural metals, contribute around three billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions. And, although recycling these ...
Apr 28, 2023
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The global push to convert the world to electric vehicles will cause supply chain complexities that could undermine the alternative energy transition in the United States, according to a new report from Rice University's ...
Apr 20, 2022
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A unique material, nickel oxide demonstrates the ability to learn things about its environment in a way that emulates the most basic learning abilities of animals, as my colleagues and I describe in a new paper.
Dec 22, 2021
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Spent lithium-ion batteries contain valuable metals that are difficult to separate from each other for recycling purposes. Used batteries present a sustainable source of these metals, especially cobalt and nickel, but the ...
Nov 15, 2021
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For artificial intelligence to get any smarter, it needs first to be as intelligent as one of the simplest creatures in the animal kingdom: the sea slug.
Sep 14, 2021
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Five years after the Paris climate agreement, all eyes are on the world's progress on the road to a carbon-free future. A crucial part of this goal involves the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such ...
Jan 5, 2021
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Recently, there have been a number of electric vehicle (EV) battery fire incidents. Unlike the batteries used in small mobile devices, such as smartphones, the battery pack of an EV is composed of hundreds of battery cells, ...
Dec 4, 2020
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Nickel ( /ˈnɪkəl/) is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile. Pure nickel shows a significant chemical activity, though larger pieces of the metal are slow to react with air at ambient conditions due to the formation of a protective oxide surface. However, nickel is reactive with oxygen to the extent that native nickel is rare on Earth's surface, and is mostly confined to the interiors of larger nickel iron meteorites, which were protected from oxidation in space. Such native nickel is always found on Earth alloyed with iron, in keeping with the element's origin as a major end-product of the nucleosynthesis process, along with iron, in supernovas. An iron-nickel alloy is thought to compose the Earth's core.
The use of nickel (as a natural meteoric nickel-iron alloy) has been traced as far back as 3500 BC. Nickel was first isolated and classified as a chemical element in 1751 by Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who initially mistook its ore for a copper mineral. Its most important ore minerals are laterites, including limonite, garnierite, and pentlandite. Major production sites include Sudbury region in Canada (which is thought to be of meteoric origin), New Caledonia and Norilsk in Russia.
Because of nickel's slow rate of oxidation at room temperature, it is considered corrosion-resistant. Historically this has led to its use for plating metals such as iron and brass, to its use for chemical apparatus, and its use in certain alloys that will retain a high silvery polish, such as German silver. About 6% of world nickel production is still used for corrosion-resistant pure-nickel plating. Nickel was once a common component of coins, but has largely been replaced by cheaper iron for this purpose, especially since the metal has proven to be a skin allergen for some people.
Nickel is one of the four elements that are ferromagnetic around room temperature. Alnico permanent magnets based partly on nickel are of intermediate strength between iron-based permanent magnets and rare earth magnets. The metal is chiefly valuable in the modern world for the alloys it forms; about 60% of world production is used in nickel-steels (particularly stainless steel). Other common alloys, as well as some new superalloys, make up most of the remainder of world nickel use, with chemical uses for nickel compounds consuming less than 3% of production. As a compound, nickel has a number of niche chemical manufacturing uses, such as a catalyst for hydrogenation. Enzymes of some microorganisms and plants contain nickel as an active center, which makes the metal an essential nutrient for them.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA