Just a side note, as I don’t know a thing about olivine, but wouldn’t they be able to pull the material from the waste piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up
Yep; straight from the tailings. It's all the transport & digging parts of mining, without any of the dangerous "going into a hole" parts of mining. Obviously, this is just a form of strip-mining so there's definite downsides.
