The Environmental Impacts of Deep Seabed Mining

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After July the 9th, Nauru gets this new level of permission to apply for permission to mine commercially. The technology is familiar from the oil and gas industry which extracts raw materials from similar depths. You essentially have a large robotic suction unit whooshes up these nodules and then they get pumped up to the surface by a support ship. When that robot drives over those nodules it will very likely destroy anything that's not bacteria.

We sit down with Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s youngest-ever spymaster. He is intense, resolute—and oddly charismatic. A world of electrified transport is going to need lots of nickel for batteries. We argue that, environmentally speaking, gathering it from the seafloor clearly beats mining it on land (11:12). And remembering Donald Triplett, the first person ever to be diagnosed with autism (19:25).

Additional audio courtesy of “In A Different Key”, inadifferentkeythemovie.com

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