Posted on 09/27/2011 4:14:55 AM PDT by bananaman22
It’s official – China’s de facto monopoly on current rare earths production is a threat to the global economy.
As least, that was the gist of hearings on 21 September by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific.
Center for a New American Security fellow Christine Parthemore ominously intoned, "Reliable access to critical minerals is a matter of both economic and geostrategic importance to the United States. Today, no minerals are more troubling to U.S. security and foreign policy than rare earth elements. Supplies are concentrated mostly in the hands of one supplier with its own rising demand, and the United States today has no good options for recycling rare earth minerals or substituting more easily obtained minerals. Even more important to the current circumstances, the United States possess rare earth reserves that will be economical to produce, which will be an important means of mitigating the foreign policy challenge surrounding rare earths while creating domestic jobs."
Not that the West should have been blindsided, as in 1992 China’s former Premier, Deng Xiaoping commented, “The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.”
In 2010 the Chinese government cut its rare earth export ceiling by 40 percent from their 2009 levels, causing prices to skyrocket, earlier this year reaching the dizzying level of over $100,000 a ton.
Japan has taken the most interesting approach to resolving the supply dilemma. While a number of Japanese companies have relocated some of their production facilities to China to avail themselves of guaranteed access and lower rare earth prices, the Japanese government just announced that it will supply about $3.9 million in a subsidy to major motor manufacturer Nidec Corp. and three other firms that are working to reduce the use of rare earths.
The obvious solution?
Dig baby dig, to paraphrase Sarah Palin.
As for the rest of the industrialized Full article: China, Japan Minuet Around the Issue of Rare Earths
Similar reserves exist elsewhere, including the US.
They are a byproduct of other mining.
They have just been cheaper to buy from China.
We have rare earths in Idaho, Montana, and California. Only California was ever mined, that closed and only recently reopened.
Australia could make some
The Endangered Species Act keeps mining to a standstill at the only US site actually in production, because the "endangered" California desert tortoise inhabits the area, and any time one of these critters enters the property, all operations must cease until it finds its way off the property, which can take hours or even a day or two.
The California desert tortoise is identical, both in appearance and genetically, to those found just a few miles away, across the Colorado River in AZ, where they are so common that they can be sold in pet stores!
People have be severely fined for possessing them, even though they were purchased across the river....NOTE: Keep your receipt!
Thorium Mining is completely synergistic with Rare Earth Metal mining. In fact one fo the things that is prevent mining rare earths here is that all the Thorium that gets dug up with Rare Earths is classified as “radioactive Waste” and has to be dealt with as such making mining rare earths here very very regulated to death and expensive. Which is fracking stuipid as the only naturally occuring isotope of Thorium has a half life of 14 billion years, which makes is practically as inert as lead.
Both Rare Earths and Thorium are mined from Monazite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite
If we were burning Thorium for fuel we would have need to mine it and rare earths mined inthe process are just gravy, or if we mine for rare earths we can sell thorium to other countries with Thorium reactors.
Instead China will beat us to the punch, mark my words. China is already working on a Liquid Thorium Floride Reactor and since they already mine Rare Earth metals they have PLENTY of fuel just waiting to be used.
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