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sigh

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This is it.

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I am standing at the place

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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

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City to a town called Delta, Utah.

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Welp, here we are

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what is it, 5:30 in the morning. And then back on the road the next morning

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as the sun rose up to meet the beryllium miners all in my quest to find out…

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Where does beryllium come from?

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So Utah is home to many valuable materials

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copper, magnesium, uranium, gold and silver.

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But most of the world's beryllium is mined here. And engineers

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chose beryllium for Webb's mirrors because it is lightweight, it is strong

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and it is dimensionally stable. So that means

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means that it is not going to warp when operating at really cold temperatures.

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What even is even here?

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As we drove down into the pit, learned that we were in fact

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fact driving on the beryllium. This rock looks

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nothing like metal.

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Where is th beryllium? How does this

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turn into this? I of course needed

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to speak to an expert, and he came in the form of the VP of operations – Greg Gregory.

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We are actually standing on the beryllium ore seam.

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Beryllium is in the volcanic ash dust.

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It was hydrothermally deposited millions of years ago

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and then coved by volcanic rock. We have to remove the volcanic rock

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on top of the ore seam and then use a scraper and a bulldozer

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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.

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Now let me clue you into how rare this

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this metal is. This area has most of the world's known beryllium,

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but the highest concentration runs through a 10-foot tall

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diagonal ribbon well below the surface of the ground.

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The ore concentration is

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0.25 percent beryllium.

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That means, in a ton of ore, there is about 5 pounds

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of beryllium.

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So to get to this point we had to remove 400 feet of rock

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to get to the ore seam. Once the ore is extracted, it goes

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through a bunch processing to extract the pure beryllium

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Then the powder beryllium is pressed into block ready for machining

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Webb's mirrors started out as solid

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5 foot tall. 5 foot wide and 2-inch-thick blocks of beryllium.

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But in order to machine those blocks

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millions of pounds of rock were removed.

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It comes to about 4 tons of rock for every pound of beryllium.

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That is a lot of work

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for one remarkable metal.

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