Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about critical minerals. The President signed an executive order not too long ago that raised the national consciousness about the strategic importance of critical minerals. You work with them every day. Can I ask you to just give us a quick understanding of what these are and why they matter?

Bob Fox Sure, very important question, and critical minerals and materials are very important. They’re metals or they’re substances that are used in technologies such as microelectronics or for electricity generation such as photovoltaics. There are energy critical materials that are all used in power generation. There are critical materials that are important to national homeland security and defense. So there’s a list of about 50, and these 50 materials, right now, the supply chain is dominated by China. So we used to mine and refine and manufacture our own critical materials and devices from critical materials, but over time, much of the mining and refining and manufacturing has been offshore to China. And China dominates. And because China dominates many of the supply chains, the manufacturing of these critical materials, it’s left a very precarious situation in the supply chain because when any country then decides to utilize those materials for political goals, they’ll start to cut off supplies and therefore supply chains are disrupted and technologies cannot make it to market. And especially Defense platforms, we cannot defend our nation. So that is why the materials are important.

Terry Gerton That is a hugely helpful background. And so then how are you and the team at Idaho National Labs involved in the critical minerals market?

Bob Fox So Idaho National Lab has separations. It is in our DNA, separations science and engineering. We develop new and advanced separations technologies. And we have been doing that ever since 1952 when the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant was developed for the nuclear fuel cycle. But we carried those technologies and advanced technologies forward into today and we’ve made them better, faster, cheaper. We’ve also developed new separations technologies. And so Idaho Natural Lab plays a very important part in providing critical materials to the supply chain for the nation because we develop separations technologies that allow those materials to go into manufacturing processes.

Terry Gerton So you’re on the science end. There’s got to be private companies or public companies that are involved in the mining side of getting these materials. How do you work with your commercial partners?

Bob Fox Yeah, absolutely. So we have several customers, federal government, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, all have separations needs for critical materials. But also we have private industry and private industry customers come to us and they have advanced technical problems and they say, we need to have help separating gallium from bauxite residues. How do we do that? How do we that better, faster, cheaper so that we can maintain competitiveness on the market, competitiveness in the rest of the world? And so helping industry with their bottom line is something that we do. And we enjoy it when industry partners come to the National Laboratory and we’re able to help them with advanced technology.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Dr. Bob Fox, he’s a directorate fellow at the Idaho National Laboratory. You do science and I think of science in a lab, I think of mining out in the field. How do you bring the science and the mining together? Do you take the science to them? Do they bring the mining to you?

Bob Fox Well, we look at our job on a daily basis as nothing more than solving problems. We’re problem solvers. We look at problems not as problems. We look at problems as challenges and opportunities. And so we bring together skilled practitioners in chemistry, chemical sciences, engineering, chemical engineering, electrochemical engineering, geosciences, and we build multidisciplinary teams that go to industry or go to the government who explain to us what they believe the problems or the challenges are and our teams then ideate and formulate ideas for how to solve the problem. So we will have a mining company come to us and say, “here’s an ore, it has uranium in it. How do we better use an in situ methodology to recover the uranium?” Here’s a mining company that comes to us and says we have cobalt and arsenic in our or how do we capture and recover the cobalt, but sequester the arsenic, which is a toxic material? How do we sequester it in a thermodynamically stable form to where we can just put it right back into the mine from which we dug it? So multiple problems, problem solving and developing advanced technologies to help private and government sponsors.

Terry Gerton I know inside the DoD lab structure they often have cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) with these kind of partners. Is that something that INL does as well?

Bob Fox Yes, absolutely. So the National Lab is open for business and the method that we do business with sponsors that are not Department of Energy sponsor — so the Department of Defense sponsors and private industry sponsors — the contract vehicles we use are cooperative research and development agreements. Another one is called strategic partnership project (SPP). Both of those are contract vehicles. They have different methods and different advantages. And so we work with our sponsors, regardless of who they are, and come up with an agreement contract vehicle that best fits their situation.

Terry Gerton Could you give us an example, maybe without naming names, of a project that you’re engaged in that’s really pushing the front edge of this kind of collaboration?

Bob Fox So yes, we have a CRADA with a private industry partner and they have mining claims and the mining claims are an ore body and the ore body has very high concentrations of rare earths, some of the highest concentrations that we have seen historically, as well as other very important materials. Gallium, for example. Vanadium by way of example. And the private industry partner came to us and asked for technology to help them derive the value or extract the materials from that ore body. But they were very conscientious of the fact that they didn’t want to do a lot of environmental damage, or minimize the environmental damage. And so they stressed very strongly that they wanted next generation technology that was minimally impactful. That was not the mining practices that would do a lot of damage in the ecosystem, but was next generation and would minimize impact, reduce waste, be very efficient, actually benefit the biosphere, benefit the ecosystem. And so those are the types of challenges that we at the National Laboratory arise to.

Terry Gerton That is a fascinating example, trying to mitigate the damage of mining with a green solution. What is on the frontier for you at INL?

Bob Fox So just that the nation has a need, and the need is critical materials and critical materials permeate throughout many next generation technologies. Everything from artificial intelligence to electric vehicles to cloud storage. The cloud is made of metal and these metals are very important and they come from the Earth. And so to get them, we have to mine them, and we want to mine in a minimally impactful way. So on our frontier is the development of next generation mining practices that are surgical, minimally impactful. It’s not grandpa’s way of mining. It is the mining of the materials in a way that is sustainable, environmentally friendly, minimally impactful. And then everything from the mine downstream to the manufacturing process, Idaho National Lab is developing new separations technologies. We’re developing advanced manufacturing technologies all to make things better, faster, cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and consuming less resources. That is what is on our future. That’s what we have our sight set on.