Replies

The way the science community uses the term ‘rare’ with these elements is misleading to most. It’s not like baseball cards, with common, uncommon, and ‘rare’. It’s not like that.

Rare in this instance pertains to the difficulty of extraction. A ‘rare earth element’ is much harder to extract, therefore much more expensive to obtain. I don’t think it means there is a shortfall.

I'm not sure the problem is that they are physically difficult to extract, but that policy has made them artificially difficult to extract. Rare earth elements are mostly found in ores along with the common, currently worse than worthless, element Thorium. Take out the 'good stuff' and what's left behind includes Thorium. Currently there are very few uses for that element so its market price is essentially zilch. But Thorium is weakly radioactive. Take it out of the ground, to get the good stuff packaged along, and now you're liable for its radioactivity and have to manage that until your liability decays. Which takes even longer than the American judicial process. Thus even though the rare earth elements in the ore are quite valuable, as are the phosphates (for fertilizer) also often found therein, the associated American legal costs are even greater. So mining them — in this country — is uneconomical.

Change the value of Thorium and this changes. China values the Thorium radiation liability at zero (along with all the other environmental liabilities of mining) so willingly mines most of the world's production. Theoretically Thorium can be used in nuclear reactors to produce loads of valuable electricity, and along the way expend its radioactive liability. Moreover, Thorium reactors can theoretically profitably destroy several other sorts of radioactive liability. The science behind Thorium reactors seems solid, but engineering and experiential proof is limited. Generic nuclear power environmental laws, driven by mindless liberal fears over Uranium reactors, currently block them — in this country. China is actively pursuing the Thorium dream of cheap, abundant, probably safe, power. Proposed US legislation could unblock both US Thorium reactors and US rare earth production.