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Will we cope if the rare earths live up to their name? http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1288357525
For decades, the world has been busy incorporating the so-called rare earth elements into all manner of high-tech devices, including disc drives, wind turbines and hybrid cars. The messy business of mining the ore and extracting the elements was left to China, and few people in the west cared that the nation controlled 97 per cent of world supply.
"Rare earth" is an alternative name for the lanthanides - elements 57 to 71 - plus yttrium and scandium, and despite the name most of them were not considered rare at all. The elements hit the headlines a few weeks ago, when China appeared to be blocking exports to Japan and the US. The Chinese government, which has also been tightening its export quotas, claims that it needs to clean up mining procedures and support its own growing demand for rare earths....
However, facilities to refine rare earths cannot be created overnight, and few US scientists know how to do it anyway. "Even if Molycorp can get material mined and concentrated right now... it would have to send that material to China to get it refined," says Gareth Hatch of Technology Metals Research, a consultancy firm in Carpentersville, Illinois.
Recycling is another option, but impurities sneak in during the process, so recycled materials are not always as good as the freshly refined equivalent. The neodymium magnets used in hybrid cars, for example, work less well at high temperatures when recycled neodymium is used.
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[Read more stories about:
technological innovation, canary in coal mine]
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This is a canary in a rare earth mine.
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