Their process looked something like this. They put the substance they were breaking down into a finger-sized quartz tube, where electricity “flashed” it to around 5400 degrees Fahrenheit. The separated components were then dissolved in a solution for chemists to retrieve later.
“Our waste stream is very different,” Tour explains. Unlike the strong nitric acid that’s often used to extract rare earths from the ground, their solution is a much weaker, more diluted hydrochloric acid. “If that got on your hand, I don’t think you’d even feel it,” Tour says.
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