
Rare Earths: The Next Resource Shortage? - purpled_haze
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/opinion/the-next-resource-shortage.html
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Animats
This guy is several years out of date. A few years ago, in 2011, there was a
rare earths shortage, made worse by export restrictions from China. Prices
went way up. Then Molycorp got the old Mountain Pass, CA mine going again,
with environmental controls even the Sierra Club says are OK. Now prices are
back down, Molycorp is producing at a loss, and a big Australian mine is
starting up.[1][2]

There's also been progress in making motor magnets with smaller amounts of
rare earths, which has cut demand.[3][4]

So today we need less, there are more sources, and the technology to solve the
waste problem from production is working. This is now a non-problem.

[1] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-22/rare-earth-miners-
face...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-22/rare-earth-miners-face-tough-
market/6786970) [2]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/06/26/three...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/06/26/three-
lessons-from-the-woeful-tale-of-molycorp/) [3] [http://www.nissan-
global.com/EN/NEWS/2012/_STORY/121120-02-e...](http://www.nissan-
global.com/EN/NEWS/2012/_STORY/121120-02-e.html) [4] [http://www.ims.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/10/Session7a_01_M...](http://www.ims.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/10/Session7a_01_Mikami_Hiroyuki_Technologies_to_replace_rare_earth_elements.pdf)

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kragen
Abraham is basically completely wrong.

The name is somewhat confusing. Rare earths aren't particularly rare. They're
about a hundred thousand times more common than actually rare metals like
platinum and gold, and about a hundred thousand times less common than common
metals like iron, magnesium, and sodium:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust)

Some of the metals mentioned in the article, like cobalt, ar neither rare nor
rare-earth. Others, like indium and gallium, are about as rare and as
expensive as silver, but are used in much smaller quantities.

Yes, rare elements help a lot with efficient wind turbines and CIGS thin-film
solar cells (although note that CIGS contains rare metals, but no rare
earths). But they aren't used at all in the silicon photovoltaic cells that
dominate the solar market now and for the foreseeable future, which don't use
any rare minerals at all. And you can build efficient wind turbines without
rare earths if you have to; you just use field coils instead of rare-earth
permanent magnets. (In fact, Abraham reports that GE wind turbines have
already made this switch.)

In direct contradiction to what Abraham says, nearly all chips are 100% rare-
earth free and rare-metal free, except for gold, which is in no danger of
supply shortages. A small fraction of high-speed bipolar chips use gallium
arsenide, which depends on rare gallium, but they're almost entirely limited
to microwave-and-up RF analog circuitry these days.

And, of course, rare metals are 100% recyclable. They aren't a resource we can
use up, except by launching them on space probes or burning them in nuclear
reactors. If we're allocating them inefficiently, we can melt down our
existing air conditioners and wind turbines to redeploy our neodymium to
higher-priority uses. It won't be long before people are digging LCD panels
out of garbage dumps to recover the thin-film indium: maybe five to thirty
years.

This is a big issue if you're in the business of making motors, generators, or
LCD panels. It affects your material costs significantly, and indeed indium
cost volatility has been a major problem over the last decade or two. But it's
not an issue at the level of human society as a whole.

I think the overwrought rhetoric here is deeply harmful because we really are
facing _real_ resource shortages: oil (though not this year), ocean-water
buffers, and our atmospheric capacity to handle carbon dioxide. Hyping up
bogus "resource shortage" dangers like this will just lead to the public
dismissing the real dangers.

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jasonlmk
You hit the nail on the head here. The real issue with abundant rare earths is
that over 95% of the global shipment of rare earths has historically been
controlled by China.

Because of this, there's significant exposure to their export policies and
hence high price volatility for these materials. For instance, in 2011,
Neodymium saw a significant surge in price just because the government decided
to limit export quotas.

~~~
ryanobjc
but also at the same time, the prices of these metals are very low, thus
suppressing interest in developing new mines. China is playing a fine
balancing game here, because if they were to highly restrict access, then
prices would justify heavy investment.

They control it yet ironically cant do anything with that control or else it
will sow the seeds of destruction of that control.

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rdlecler1
If this became a true national security threat the US would have production in
a few weeks, it's just that right now it's much cheaper to outsource this to
China.

