Slashdot Mirror
Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
is by far the most serious in the above list. Ok, so flat panel manufacturers and researchers would have to pay top dollar, no biggie. But copper is going to get more and more crucial as the combined crunch of oil shortage and increased electrical demands are going to combine.
MP3 Search Engine
When an LCD display breaksdown, they won't be able to crush them into tiny bits, smelt them and recover the material? All it means is your 50" LCD monitor will have some significant residual value and you will sell the dead monitor for some money instead of throwing it in the dumpster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
*Tries to shoot self but fails due to gun not functioning without Zinc*
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
We arent doomed, zinc will still exist, the amount we consume/need is fractional and exists all over the surface of the planet...
Its just not "farmable" in large amounts that way, therefore they say its "all gone" as far as electronics and such go...
Apparently Gallium isn't a Rare Earth Element.
Actually, neither is Hafnium, Indium, Zinc or Copper. Does the article have any connection to the rare earth elements at all?
that depends how much do you rely on goods that travel by ship on salt water?
Zinc anodes are used as an corrosion point for salt water. So Instead of eating the steel hulls in the ships Zinc anodes take the damage. On salt water boats they have to be replaced annually or more.
without zinc world wide shipping will come to a halt a decade later.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'm setting up a massive stockpile of unobtanium against the day that it becomes useful.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Yep, clueless, check this story
The authors apparently do not realize that the available amount of Gallium depend on the price:
Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram
Indeed, im not sure about all these -iums, which are no doubt toxic to us anyways... but zinc and copper is pretty easy to recycle, and in a decade, we might not need the -iums we (dont really) need now...
Especially if we upgrade all the phone and cable lines to optical, and recycle those trillion miles of copper, and as we move away from coin money (another debate unto itself) there's also that (both copper and zinc), replacing copper pipes with plastic, etc, etc, etc... although, all that plastic is also another debate.
actually vacuum tubes were depleting our reserves of vacuum. By the time they went out of use, there was no vacuum left on earth! Some proposed mining vacuum from deep space, but it wasn't practical.
Shut up, shut up, shut up.
You should be modded redundant because this is now the third time in this discussion I've had to tear down this ideological pop-economic BULLSHIT.
The market doesn't govern the physical universe. At all. The amounts of material and energy present on Earth are in no way related to the laws of supply and demand. The universe is indifferent to your over-applied, unfalsifiable theories. Applying your (almost certainly feeble) understanding of economics implies the universe responds like a rational actor, an idiotic notion that underpins most religion and superstition.
Sometimes 'cheaper alternatives' just don't exist. This is why your precious markets have never got to grips with spaceflight. The markets reaction has always been "Wait till it is cheaper" on the assumption that all technology gets cheaper - ignoring the fact that there is a physical constraint on what you must do to get into orbit. The required delta-V isn't going to change just because it would be financially efficient for it to do so.
If you are a true economist, then fuck off and play with your stock markets and leave actual science to actual scientists.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But the price of gallium will affect the availability of gallium in a form that humans find easily useable.
An increase in price means an increase in resources that can be devoted to extracting gallium and still leave the extractor with a profit.
An increase in price also means that alternatives that used to be more expensive could be less expensive now, which lowers demand for gallium.
Economics isn't a perfect science, and it often heavily relies on imperfect data from a biased world. But I wouldn't put it in the same realm as reading tea leaves.
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
So that's it then: we HAVE to go discover Rare Moon elements, Rare Mars elements, Rare Ganymede elements, ad infinitum...
It's all a cunning plan by NASA to stay employed!
(do I really NEED to put a '/sarc' after this?)
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
Have a look here for starters...
Political language
Zinc is old-tech for an anode.
The Army Corps of Engineers (at a lab I used to work at) invented a Ceramic Anode.
A 20oz Ceramic anode does the job of a 50lb Metalic one, huge-huge improvement.
Read all about it.
http://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/pls/erdcpub/docs/erdc/images/ERDCFactSheet_Product_CeramicAnodes.pdf
It is not scaremongering, it is just cry from people that the game is changing but they don't know themselves in which way. The issue boils down to investments. Plenty of alternatives, enough undiscovered country (as you said, ocean floor) and many old mines will become economically viable again. BUT, you do need investments for those, and people do need to realize the consequences.
8 to 10 years ago, you could here these same stories about the oil demand outgrowing the oil supply due to lack of investments and geopolitical issues. Now that that time is here, politicians act like they didn't see it coming and consumers are complaining they can't afford to fill up their SUV's.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
somehow create the elements synthetically
Let me go fire up my heavy fusion reactor and get to work on that.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
ad infinitum
It's a good thing we have plenty of infinitum.
Why? It seems to me that landfills would be more concentrated and easier to mine than natural ores are!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It seems that way.
Indium, for example, is more common than silver, and the only reason for the supposed scarcity on the market is that the Chinese mining companies stopped extracting it from their zinc tailings.
I suspect a large proportion of the fear mongering derives from the way mining companies define resources and reserves. The type of exploration required to turn a mineral resource (what miners expect to find) into an ore reserve (what they have proved to be there) is expensive. It doesn't make sense to prove up more ore than is needed for the immediate continuity of the company.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
so you HAVE had my wife's cooking!
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
from TFA: "But we can't exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself."
Don't we have lots of Indium reservations throughout the American southwest? Why don't we, you know, just use that?
blah blah blah
Brazil has used methanol as fuel for about 20yrs now, and there is NO food shortage here. Actually, there is so much food here that we export it to USA, Europe, China... And this having the greatest number of cars using biofuel in the world.
Brazil has a rainforest shortage - the Amazon is on the verge of collapse.
This is allegedly done for grazing cattle, not for sugar. I don't believe it. I remember reading that Brazilian ethanol imports were increasing; where's it coming from?
Topsoil-based fuels are basically wrongheaded because as your energy consumption rises you need more acres of land which you would rather use for something else. "Green Revolution" architecture is horribly destructive to the land and the soil.
And what are they fertilizing with?
Anyway, you have an incredibly simplistic view of the situation. Although there is no "food shortage" in the US (you can walk into any supermarket and buy the necessities) we have shortages of corn and barley right now because we are making ethanol from them. The former has seriously harmed the average Mexican and the latter has driven up the price of beer. (Especially on top of the hops shortage.) Clearly you don't understand the concept of shortages. Incidentally, though, world food supplies are in trouble. Meat is doing pretty well, but plants are having problems all over. This last season's weather was troublesome all over the world. Year before last the grape vines on the front porch were just covered in grapes; this year it got warm early and the grapes leafed out and prepared to put on a big fruit set, then got frozen hard. This happened over much of the world, and it happened to the grape and nut crops this year in particular. Most vineyards around my area - did I mention that the next county to the south is Napa, and Mendocino is to the West? - aren't even going to bother to harvest anything this year. It's not worth the trouble.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When the cost of producing a currency exceeds it's value, it's shameful to keep making it.
Off topic, but coins are circulated more than once. Much more. Coins as currency last longer than paper notes.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
The Mint doesn't have the authority to boss the states around. Some might say the federal government doesn't have much authority at all as to how a state will issue its own taxes within its borders.
It's embarrassing to have to throw the things in the trash because they're completely useless and (by law) can't be recycled.
Are you sure they can't be recycled? Perhaps you're thinking of the law that prohibits people OTHER than the government to recycle the materials. I find it highly unlikely the trash bins behind The Mint has a bunch of money in it.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Why not just roll 'em up and deposit into your bank account? Spend them? Use the coin counters at the supermarket? Truly it is the life of excess where you can decline money and wish you could just toss it away.
More Twoson than Cupertino
We haven't hit peak oil yet.
This statement is confused at best, a bald-faced lie at worst.
At any moment, there was another moment in the past at which oil production has peaked. That was peak oil. We won't know whether it was THE peak until we either exceed that past peak or until we've waited ... how long? How many years do we have to go past a peak in oil production until you people will admit that this was THE peak oil?
Crude prices have exploded over the last couple years and yet the production peak of May 2005 has never been exceeded. If we can not increase production at $140 per barrel over that when it was $50 then I'm puzzled where anybody gets the sheer pigheaded ignorance to claim that we haven't hit peak oil yet (or mod such a claim "insightful").
There's always the chance that we haven't. There's always the possibility that something completely unforseen happens in the future -- that's why it's the future. But to look at the flat line in that graph and pretend that it is magically going to go up at some time in the future betrays a confidence born exactly out of putting one's head into the sand.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Do you know what Peak Oil is?
Peak Oil:
"Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline."
It's not about depleting all oil reserves but the easily extracted oil reserve. There are reserves you can extract oil from but the cost of extraction will exceed revenue. Not too mention the amount of energy needed to extract the oil will be greater further driving up the cost of extracting the oil.
We've hit Peak Oil. It's a question of where we are on Hubbert's Bell-Curve.
FYI Oil companies have done vast surveys of potential oil reserves. Other than deep sea exploration - all the easily extractable reserves are known.
Easter Island. When they cut down the last tree (for moving those carved heads around on rollers), they couldn't build boats to go fish with, or leave. Invoking economics will not always get you out of a man-made catastrophe - global warming anyone?
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.