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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."
that this article doesn't touch on at all is does this affect Solid State Drives (SSDs)? Probably not because they don't use magnets. So this will just speed up the jump to SSDs. You could be the cynic and think that somehow China decided to raise rare earth prices to drive SSDs, but I kinda doubt that Hard drives in general make up a significant part of that decision.
That's okay. With the economy where it is, we can replace the magnets with interns.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
All that is needed is the US government to guarantee purchase at some set price and dozens of new mines would open overnight in the US.
No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening of rare earth mines. What you may need is a waiver from the EPA.
Rare earth mining is problematic because even 'high quality' ore is very dilute. Vast quantities of material have to be processed in order to obtain any product. The primary extractive processes aren't all that polluting. The mines use a combination of physical process (magnetic separation, water separation) to concentrate the material to about 50% purity. Getting it from 50% to pure metal, however, requires quite a bit of energy and the use of a number of toxic processes.
One way to solve this problem is to do the primary extraction at the mine site and then transport the more valuable (and now quite a bit more concentrated) ore to a central site which has the technology and supervision to further extract the material at minimal environmental risk. The US DOE (Dept. of Energy) is looking into these sorts of issues. Of course, China need not be bothered by any of this mamby pamby Greeny stuff, so they have a built in competitive advantage.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Right now Hybrid vehicles either use brushless DC or permeant magnet excited AC motors. Both need rare earth magnets and neither are as powerful or efficient for their application as switched reluctance motors which do not use magnets at all. If the electric auto industry was innovative, they would all be using switched reluctance motors and China could eat their rare earth magnets.
My guess is a swamp of patents by Toyota that keep them in the dark ages so they can protect their IP.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
The Chinese will mess with the price of Rare Earths (which are not really all that rare) and the US will almost certainly begin using its own from a major find in California. All the while Austrailia, Japan, Africa and South America look at seriously developing their resources. The real lock China has on Rare Earths is its processing (pretty much the only game in town right now.) Here's a chance for the U.S. to get back into industrial jobs (god forbid) and produce a lasting job base for a new global economic boom in the rare earth arena. The Chinese advantage is short term, and if they squeeze too hard, the world will simply take their business away. Nobody likes a chiseler.
By the way rare earths are used all over the place and for a dizzying array of things. There are about 400 lbs of them in a late model Prius. They are used in virtually all green tech (high performance generators in modern wind mills are pretty much sluggs of rare earths.) Colorful plasma and LED displays use them (that cool display on your smart phone is probably chock full of rare earths.) Florescent lighting that is any color but off green uses rare earth mixed in with the coating. Rare earths are used in glass making, advanced textiles, plastics with special properties (OLEDs), and anything that uses an enhanced magnetic field from an earbud to an mag-lev train. Even the "Euro" contains a trace of Europium as an elemental pun. Modern society runs on rare earths.
!! 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.