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trhwayyesterday at 11:11 PM2 repliesview on HN

>concentrating one gram of platinum from one ton of iron would be tremendously difficult, requiring a huge amount of energy.

melting one ton of iron requires 500KWh, 12 gallons of gasoline, less than $100 on Earth. Or 5 Tesla car batteries fully charged by say 30x30 m solar array in 2.5 hours - cost nothing in space once you got the hardware there. This is why mining in space is going to be a pretty big thing once/if we get cheap launch capability.


Replies

nerdralphyesterday at 11:40 PM

Since you didn't show your math, I did a quick calculation. .45J/g/C specific heat of iron means .45MJ/tonne. 1811K to melt iron means 815MJ/tonne. 3.6kWh/MJ, so 226.4 kWh should melt 1t of iron.

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vkoutoday at 1:44 AM

> melting one ton of iron requires 500KWh, 12 gallons of gasoline, less than $100 on Earth

The spot price for platinum today is $68, so you'd be losing money doing it.