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Rare Earth Restrictions To Raise Hard Drive Cost
MojoKid writes "Multiple manufacturers in the IT industry have been keeping a wary eye on China's decision to cut back on rare earth exports and the impact it may have on component prices. There have been reports that suggest we'll see that decision hit the hard drive industry this year, with HDD prices trending upwards an estimated 5-10 percent depending on capacity. Although rare earth magnets are only a small part of a hard drive's total cost, China cut exports last year by 40 percent, which drove pricing for these particular components up an estimated 20-30x. China currently controls 97 percent of the rare earth elements market for popular metals like neodymium, cerium, yttrium and ytterbium."
actually, you're 100% wrong.
The restrictions are to try to get high tech industry to develop in China. There are no restrictions of use of rare earth metals in China, just the export of the raw materials. It's a good way to ensure high tech manufacturing does develop. Essentially China can hold the world to ransom due their highly developed and underpaid RE mining industry. It's much cheaper to refine RE minerals in China due to lack of industrial relations and environmental laws.
Hell, even Australian RE companies are hesitant to set up refining here due to the massive amounts of radioactive waste from refining RE minerals.
China are even buying up large stakes in Australian RE mining companies just to gain even more of an edge. Chinalco attempted to take over Australia's largest RE miner and was blocked by the ACCC in no small part due to China's stance on RE exports.
Maybe look a bit deeper rather than just looking at company profits. China are all about bringing jobs onshore and having the upper hand globally.
Aside from this, very happy I bought 4x 2GB HDDs recently for my new array, in before the price rise!
!! sarcasm alert !!
Read it again. I don't think China is doing anyone a favor by trashing their environment for short term profit. The balance between environmental regulation and economic opportunity is a difficult one to maintain, but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
My point is that with some forethought and planning, it appears possible to increase the US rare earth mining with acceptable environmental damage by centralizing the secondary refinement process so it can be closely controlled and monitored and perhaps reap some benefits of scale. There was an interesting report on this somewhere, can't recall where I found it and Google and my brain aren't working together as a team this afternoon....
In general, China's current approach to trashing the environment on a huge scale is going to come back and bite them in the ass within a generation. Inscrutable long term planning, indeed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Unless something happens like happened to aluminum. At one point it was one of, if not the, most difficult metals to refine, and was worth more than gold or in some cases platinum. Then over the span of about a year, a couple people developed a new method of refining it. The price crashed to where, while still more expensive than other metals, is so cheap that we throw away cans and foil made out of it.
If there's a fusion breakthrough, oil prices will crash within a year or two. Rare earths are actually not that rare, they just take a lot of work to refine. If some new, cheaper method of refining them is invented, any vast reserves of them that we are hoarding could become worthless overnight.
Pass environmental laws because you want to protect the environment. Not because you want to gamble that a material will become rarer and more desirable in the future, under the guise of "planning ahead". If you really think the gamble is worth it, then be forthcoming and advocate planning ahead and conserving those supplies for exactly that reason (e.g. helium). Don't try to spin it as justification for environmental laws or vice versa.