Mohave County miner and our mineral wealth., 1919-06-07

when it has no more fuel? Authori ties differ about the stock of coal and oil that remains for our use, but E. T. Brondson, writing in The Electrical Experimenter (New York, May), has come to the decidedly pessimistic con- clusion that we will surely be out of both forever at the conclusion of the present century, provided our present rate of consumption is neither raised nor lowered. Since we have no as- surance that the rate of increase of consumption will not keep on. MT. Brondson believes that. the year 1875 will see coal and oil so scarce that only millionaires can afford them. Coal, he thinks, may then be $500 a ton and crude oil $25 a gallon. He goes on:
 "Rising prices and increasing scar city surely will drive us to other fuels. Alcohol has been cited as probabil- ity, mainly because it can be produced anywhere crops are grown. The truth of this matter is that if the fuel re- quirements of the world were to be supplied by the worlds crops there would be no crops left to feed the worlds inhabitants.
 "The final summation simply is that when coal and oil both give out we will have an era of substitutes beside which the war-bread of the past year will be heavenly We will scratch around, burn up all our forests, dig our peat-bogs to the bolton, and do what we can to find other substances to supply the deficiency. All the sub- stitutes will be costly, both from point of view of actual price and in point of efficiency. Those who can not afford to use them will simply have to move toward the equator or freeze to death.
 "Radium is the one direct answer to the problem raised by this situ- tion. True, it exists only in minute quantities in the earth's crust. True, under our present system of extrac- tion it costs prohibitively. Still, it is the only logical answer.
 "Why? While radium is present only in proportions of from one to three grains per ton in the outer thirty miles of the earth's crust-ex- cluding the oceans, of course, in which there is only trace-there is suffi- cient of it in the upper two miles of crust to supply all possible power wants of man. The fact that it now costs us over a half-million dollars a pound to extract it is no argument. The scientific brains of the world nev- CT has been focused on the problem of securing radium. Only the inventive skill of small number of people has been concerned with the process of mining and extracting any kind of precious metal. With only few doz- en laboratories in the world knowing anything whatever about radium, the cost of securing the metal has been cut in half in the last four years. In the event that radium showed itself to be the only salvation for men outside of the equatorial zone, would not this cost be slaughtered? Would not rad ium be extracted by the ton instead of by the milligram? When it is con- sidered that by the extraction of all the radium in a belt of land ten miles wide by three miles deep, extending around the earth, sufficient of the metal would be secured to run civilization just as it stands until eter- nity, without further outlay for power of any kind, does this seem impossi- ble? It would be an undertaking for centuries, undoubtedly, but what of it? There would be little or no depre- citation in the metal secured year by year, and every tiny particle mined and extracted would do away with the necessity for just so much other fuel. In case the project were started under government or other competent super vision, the probability would be strong that the descending price curve of radium would cross the rising cost curve of other fuels in the course of from fifty to one hundred years.
 The only alternative to this some what desperate plan seems to MT. Brondson to be the piping of steam and hot air from the earth's interior. On a small scale this has been done already in Italy, but being of a gloomy temperament, he fears that serious disturbances, earthquakes, cracking of the crust, and other dis asters might follow the experiment of trying this on large scale. He says:
 "The trouble mainly would be caus- ed by sudden cooling of certain DOT tions while the other parts remained in a motion state. The great catas- trophe of a tremendous crack appear ing in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with the resultant clouds of live steam and poison gas covering the earth and killing all animal and vegetable life, would be the great debacle most to be dreaded. Taking all into con- %ko ha, ,i