Posted on 09/27/2010 10:31:19 AM PDT by epithermal
Action is heating up in the world of rare earth minerals. China has blocked exports of rare earths to Japan over a fishing dispute between the two countries.
-snip-
"It is precisely this type of vulnerability in the overall rare earths supply chain [for geopolitical reasons and others] that makes it important for Japan and other countries to diversify their supply chains for rare earths," adds Hatch.
That diversification may soon get a jump start. Today, the House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee approved legislation to authorize funding by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for a $70 million research and development center to study new ways to mine and process rare earths. The bill also contains authorization for DOE to fund a loan-guarantee program designed to restart U.S. rare earth-mining operations.
The last U.S. rare earths mine was shuttered in 2002 because of a combination of environmental concerns and the fact that they could not compete with the cheaper prices for rare earth minerals being offered by China.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Yep, we need to put the FREE back into Free Enterprise!
Let America produce again!
To get rid of restrictions, you’d have to make government so small, as one FReeper’s tag put it, to drown it in a bathtub. Then America could pick up again and be a great nation once more. (as long as Obama is in office and Democrats have a majority, America is not a great nation)
Aside from that, I’ll work in a mine as long as the health hazards are minimized. Asthma sucks
Not for long. Obama will put a moratorium on digging too, and the EPA will block all attempts for permits as mining causes global warming.
Correct. China can dig an ship it cheaper to the US because they have NO environmental concerns.
While I do agree wholeheartedly that we need to largely dump the environmental restrictions, Freepers often ignore the cost of labor in the U.S. as a major factor in the price of production and manufacturing.
It would be an interesting study to see the effects of dropping minimum wage laws altogether. Would people work?
I find this assertion very far fetched.
First, we do not have significant deposits of rare earth elements, as far as I know.
Second, it would take (as other posters have stated) lotsa years of enviro lawsuits to open any such mine.
Third, rare earths are, uhhh, rare. Very rare. Prevalence in the earth’s crust in the ten-thousandths and hundred-thousandths of a given weight. At the point where these minerals are 5 or 10 or 100x as costly as gold, they are not going to form the foundation of anything approaching economic viability.
Calls for “free market” are all well and good, but lacking a Chinese source for these elements puts them out of the range of commercial viability. Sure, speculators and mine owners will become filthy rich, perhaps, if they can get past the enviro concerns and open a mine. But if our flat screens end up quadrupling or octupling in price it won’t be a happy condition. On the other hand, we don’t make any of that stuff here anyway. Another source will just have to be found. I think Russia has decent deposits of REs. Heh.
Now for sure, a mine doesn’t just extract one mineral. For example, virtually all large silver mines are actually copper, zinc, and tin mines with silver (and some gold) as byproducts. So there’s that. But no mine is going to open just as a source of these rare minerals. At the point where they are too expensive to extract, it will still be cheaper to buy them from the Chinese. IMHO.
Unions have artificially inflated domestic wages. American companies have difficulty competing with cheap labor in places like China, India, and Mexico. Getting rid of the unions would have a more profound effect on boosting domestic production.
A portion of the rare earths ~ the lanthanides ~ are actually a byproduct of radioactive decay.
This is a special case of environmental concern ~ not the normal sort of thing where we are all worried about typical heavy metals, cyanide, and killing snail darters.
They use both magnetic and gravity type operations to separate the metals out of the ores ~ usually called "heavy sands".
In short, it's hot stuff ~ and just making it safe for humans to participate in costs something.
Those "dog hole" mines in China are being shut down as fast as the Chinese can find them because of the lack of controls to prevent radioactive debris from being tossed about. Guess it has turned into a disaster for them.
Agreed, that’s why I said “many”, not all. I realize that many early mining ventures in the USA have laid waste to the land. But, recent reclamation laws are strict and do produce results. I wish I could find my link to an article I once read about reclamation efforts in Nevada which had some great before and after reclamation photos. I found it hard to tell there had ever been a mine in the locations they described.
“
Chinese Threat on Rare Earth Minerals Could Revitalize U.S. Mines
“
Revitalize?
When Obama and his moronic head of the EPA are in control?
Stick it, China! Axcess News headlines the prospect: Largest Rare Earth Mine in the World Discovered in Nebraska.
http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2010/05/19/buried-rare-earth-element-treasure-in-nebraska/
The fact that rare earths have been so cheap from countries like China, where no environmental restrictions apply, has meant there has been no exploration for deposits in the USA for years. Geologists don’t sit around waiting for the next boom to occur, they go into other careers.
You may find this interesting:
World Resources: Rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust, but discovered minable concentrations are less common than for most other ores. U.S. and world resources are contained primarily in bastnäsite and monazite. Bastnäsite deposits in China and the United States constitute the largest percentage of the world’s rare-earth economic resources, while monazite deposits in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the United States constitute the second largest segment. Apatite, cheralite, eudialyte, loparite, phosphorites, rare-earth-bearing (ion adsorption) clays, secondary monazite, spent uranium solutions, and xenotime make up most of the remaining resources. Undiscovered resources are thought to be very large relative to expected demand.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2010-raree.pdf
The name rare earths is a misnomer because they are not all that rare. It is just that you seldom find commercial grade deposits of elements that so readily substitute into other minerals. A mineral deposit is a freak occurrence in nature because normally earth processes disperse elements, not concentrate them. For instance, gold is everywhere in the earth’s crust and water, but seldom in concentrations that allow economic production.
A direct result of lack of private ownership of land. As a general rule, people take care of their own land, but don't care what they dump on "public" land.
When I was in the coal mining business, we leased the land from area farmers/landowners. Our activities were scrutinized by state and federal mine inspectors, Mine Safety inspectors, a guy from the EPA who visited one a year to collect dust samples and a near-daily inspection by the guy who owned the land.
Not if zer0 has anything to do with it. Mines mean jobs, can’t be having any of that now!
The obvious solution is to reduce our dependence on foreign rare earths. Expect obama, boxer, et al to ban all domestic mining of rare earths, and raise taxes on all domestic sales, pass laws criminalizing the use of anything containing rare earths in favor of something “greener,” and have a new Rare Earth Czar suggest “guidelines” for conserving what few rare earth products we have.
Stop buying computers, iPods, iPads, defense electronics, flat-screen TV’s, all other TV’s, radios, GPS units, electronic watches, and turn off all the ones you already have, and cultivate home gardens where we grow our own yttrium, scandium and the rest of the two bottom lines on the Periodic Table, and, oh yeah, continue pouring trillions of dollars into China for the importation of rare earths to the US, so that democrats can remain on the China payroll as they are on the Saudi and Mideast oil payroll for resisting true oil independence.
I agree that there probably hasn’t been all that much exploration (and thus, discovery nor enumeration) for REs per se in the US. So, their prevalence is at least partially an unknown. However, where we find most of our non-ferrous goodies in the US = the West, *has* been widely though certainly not exhaustively explored. So the odds are shrunken that we’ll find anything monumental. Sure, there’s always the possibility of finding a mother lode somewhere, but it’s not a great bet.
Still. Never mind the eco considerations, mining exclusively for REs seems pretty far fetched in terms of economic viability within the US. Monazite is generally known as home of Thorium. If we were mining thorium, we’d be getting REs along with the thorium. But we’re not with any great gusto.
I don’t especially agree that they are relatively abundant, even if the WRC says so. The rare earths are 17 elements and ALL OF THEM, taken together, might be a little less rare than “rare” but getting any particular ONE of them, the one you need, remains a needle-in-the-haystack affair. They are usually grouped all together in the type of generalistic reports you linked and IMO that gives the impression they are statistically more common than they are in reality.
Anyone who has ever been in the exploration business knows you have to remain optimistic! I still think there are many areas yet to be thoroughly explored because the US mining industry is essentially dead except for gold. Companies hire and fire geologists based on the fluctuating commodity prices, so since no demand has existed for rare earths or other metals, they have fired many of their geologists. If you look at college programs in geology in the US today, they are all but dead and a lot of them have been converted to “environmental geology” programs.
Companies that explore for gold don’t necessarily pay any attention to rare earths. And when you consider that most of the old time prospectors in the western US had no formal training in geology, I wouldn’t say that the western US has been explored all that well. If there was no gold in a rock, most of the old prospectors just threw it in the waste pile.
As for the whether rare earths are “abundant” or not, I would disagree, but there is no reason to argue over it. Abundance of elements in the earths crust has been studied to death. You might be interested in the graph here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
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