US Gives $120M For Lab To Tackle Rare Earth Shortages

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US Gives $120M For Lab To Tackle Rare Earth Shortages

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 9, 2013 @10:26PM from the making-rare-more-common dept.

coondoggie writes "With China once again playing games with the rare earth materials it largely holds sway over, the U.S. Department of Energy today said it would set up a research and development hub that will bring together all manner of experts to help address the situation. The DOE awarded $120 million to Ames Laboratory to set up an Energy Innovation Hub that will develop solutions to the domestic shortages of rare earth metals and other materials critical for U.S. energy security, the DOE stated."

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Solution by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-09 22:30 · Score: 2, Funny

Just lick butt of mighty China.
Now give me my $120M please.
1. Re:Solution by niado · 2013-01-10 03:32 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I'm regularly astounded at how little the US posters know about their own country. The State governments and Congress runs the country. Obama is in control of foreign policy and defence only. He has buggerall to do with the internal affairs of the USA.
  While I wholeheartedly agree with your point that most Americans believe that the president has more power than he actually does, and I am continually exasperated by political discussion that vividly illustrates this point, your statement is not entirely accurate.
  
  The POTUS is directly responsible for a very large segment of the government. In addition, to quote wikipedia "each modern president, despite possessing no formal legislative powers beyond signing or vetoing congressionally passed bills, is largely responsible for dictating the legislative agenda of his party and the foreign and domestic policy of the United States." The influence of the POTUS has grown substantially since FDR's presidency.
2. Re:Solution by Runaway1956 · 2013-01-10 03:48 · Score: 2
  
  " is largely responsible for dictating the legislative agenda of his party "
  I think you've got that skewed. The party more likely dictates the presidents agenda. They leave him a lot of leeway, to be sure, but the party has an "agreement" in place before they ever nominate the guy for office.
  
  --
  "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Viability of ocean mining? by rolfwind · 2013-01-09 22:32 · Score: 2

I realize it's going to take robots/remote control machines and such but what is the real hurdle to ocean mining because I imagine that there is a lot of unexplored spots in the world and there could be a ton of material in the oceans just waiting for us.
1. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by CSMoran · 2013-01-09 22:35 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  what is the real hurdle to ocean mining
  The first google hit on "rare earths ocean" says this
  
  Deep-sea mining is an old idea, but one that has yet to prove itself in the face of high costs and environmental concerns. Discovered decades ago, chunks of manganese on the ocean floor and deposits of metals such as zinc and copper in the Red Sea have proven impractical to mine.
  
  “I don’t understand how this can be expected to be an economic way to recover rare earth,” says Daniel Cordier, a mineral commodity specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Minerals Information Center in Reston, Va.
  
  --
  Every end has half a stick.
2. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by ShanghaiBill · 2013-01-09 22:48 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Ocean mining is not necessary because there is no particular shortage of rare earth ore. China is not the leader because they have the only rare earths, but because low labor costs made it cheaper to mine them there. Since they began to impose export restriction, rising prices have enabled operations to restart in several mines, including the Mountain Pass Mine in California.
  But reducing the need for rare earths is also a good idea, so the research being funded makes sense. However, just handing out grants is the wrong approach . It would be much better to set out the goals and offer specific awards for achieving them. Competitive contests, like the DARPA Grand Challenge, the Ansari X Prize, and the Google Lunar X Prize, have been far more effective at achieving results than grant based funding.
3. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by Luckyo · 2013-01-09 23:09 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Not so much about cheap labour as it is about less stringent environmental standards. The biggest cost of rare earth mining is keeping it as clean as regulations require and China has large areas which are completely and utterly poisoned by rare earth mining.
  That's in fact one of the reasons (and the main official reason) why China is currently restricting rare earth exports. Mining and refining rare earths is a very toxic process.
4. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by telchine · 2013-01-09 23:34 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  However, just handing out grants is the wrong approach . It would be much better to set out the goals and offer specific awards for achieving them.
  The goal in this case is to obtain materials. And the reward is money. So you're suggesting that we offer money in exchange for rare earth materials. That's called buying it. We do that already and it's expensive. I think funding research is a good idea in this case!
5. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by ShanghaiBill · 2013-01-09 23:43 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The goal in this case is to obtain materials.
  No, that is not the goal. The goal of the research is to reduce or eliminate the need for the rare earth metals.
6. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-09 23:46 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Grants are not "just handed out". Grants are awarded to the best plan that is submitted.
  Also, grants are much better, because they allow many more different types of research to be funded, rather than just the tiny scope of engineering challenges. Yes, each of these engineering challenges is good, and yes they produce results, but that is because engineering lends itself perfectly for such a challenge. The general idea is the same, but the approaches to the problem are different; doing them in parallel and with different teams makes sense, and each contribution is valuable even if they do not win. However, in the case of research, it does not make sense to repeat work several times.
7. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by feedayeen · 2013-01-09 23:50 · Score: 2
  
  Surely it has to be more feasible than capturing an asteroid to mine though?
  E.g.:
  http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/21/229248/billionaires-and-polymaths-expected-to-unveil-a-plan-to-mine-asteroids
  http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/31/1656237/chinese-want-to-capture-an-asteroid
  Yes, but nobody is actually seriously considering that option either. Hiring an pundit to think of ideas and write about them doesn't cost much. Actual implementation would require you to cube their salary raising the cost from a few thousand to a few billion.
8. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by serviscope_minor · 2013-01-09 23:53 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  China is not the leader because they have the only rare earths, but because low labor costs made it cheaper to mine them there.
  It's a mixture of several things:
  * low labour costs
  * lax safety standards
  * lax environmental standards
  * goverment subsidy plus dumping to put everyone else out of business
  
  --
  SJW n. One who posts facts.
9. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by balsy2001 · 2013-01-09 23:56 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  The other idea that gets thrown around a lot is to make them in a reactor. I used to work at a DOE facility where every year or so we would be asked about this specific problem and if we couldn't just make X isotope. Sure you can make all kinds of elements through transmutation, but the volume of production is just not very high unless you have massive amounts of infrastructure to create them (lots of reactors specifically for the task) and for most things special chemical facilities to separate all of the various radioactive stuff out (if you put in a specimen X you don't just get 100% of Y after a certain amount of time, and because of special DOE moratoriums it would be nearly impossible to "free release" any of this material for commercial/industrial use). That is why generally speaking it only makes sense to produce a limited number of elements in this manner, usually ones you don't need a lot of and ones you specifically want to be radioactive (there are some medical isotopes and cobalt sources for imaging where this does make sense and is done).
  
  --
  GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
10. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by todrules · 2013-01-10 00:15 · Score: 2
  
  Basically, it's just like extracting oil from tar sands. Until very recently it was just not economically viable to get oil that way. However, once the price of oil hit a certain mark, then it was. Ocean mining for minerals is the same way. At the moment, it's not economically viable. At some point in the future, it will be.
11. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-10 00:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Not necessarily. Probably not in the medium term, and in the long term there is no comparison.
  The biggest barriers to asteroid mining are the high cost of surface to orbit transit and a lack of orbital infrastructure. When a fully mechanized asteroid capture and processing system makes it past those hurdles, though that may take a while, the price of scaling everything up starts dropping to free:
  - There is no superlinear increase in mining cost with increased extraction, since the robots can cherrypick small asteroids that are easy to drill through.
  - There's far more of every nonorganic resource out there, in relatively easy reach, than we could possibly need. Even into the fairly distant future.
  - Most if not all of the infrastructure will become useful for things other than asteroid mining: Science, space tourism, solar and horticultural farms, manufacturing, colonization, etc. The pressure problem renders this bonus nearly nonexistent for undersea infrastructure.
  - Sending mountains of mined ore back down is free. Don't give me that look.
  In contrast:
  - Anything sent into space only needs to withstand only one to zero atmospheres of pressure, while sea mining requires pressure changes hundreds to thousands of times larger.
  - Objects in space are easier to track and can be surveyed by external instruments in the event of system failures.
  - Smartly repurposed mining slag from asteroids won't pollute our biosphere the way it might underwater.
  - Robots sink to the sea floor, but megatons of heavy ore will have to fight gravity bitterly for every meter to the surface.
  And as far as I'm aware, in space there are significantly fewer house-sized monsters with a taste for cable sheathing.
12. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by ShanghaiBill · 2013-01-10 00:49 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Grants are not "just handed out". Grants are awarded to the best plan that is submitted.
  Have you ever worked in a research lab? I have. We had two tiers of scientists. The best people were dedicated to the activity that brought in the revenue: writing proposals. The second tier spent their time on less important tasks, like doing research. The primary purpose of the research was to produce non-definitive results that could be used to justify more funding.
  During the 1980s and 1990s DARPA poured tens of millions into research on robotics and automated vehicles, all for little effect. Then they offered a small fraction of their previous spending as a monetary prize for a specific result, and the result was rapid and revolutionary progress. Competition works.
  The $120 million that DOE is spending on this is sixty times the cost of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Do you really think it is going to be anywhere near as effective?
13. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by mooingyak · 2013-01-10 00:54 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  And as far as I'm aware, in space there are significantly fewer house-sized monsters with a taste for cable sheathing.
  You had some good points up until you casually dismissed the stellar kraken.
  
  --
  William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
14. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by __aaltlg1547 · 2013-01-10 01:49 · Score: 2
  
  The goal in this case is to obtain materials.
  No, that is not the goal. The goal of the research is to reduce or eliminate the need for the rare earth metals.
  No, the goal is to get the cost, including externalities, below the utility.
15. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by h4rr4r · 2013-01-10 01:53 · Score: 2
  
  During the 80s and 90s that sort of computer power was barely possible to create. The money DARPA spent on those automated vehicles and other projects for AI and computer vision are why later competitions could even be held.
16. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by TubeSteak · 2013-01-10 03:28 · Score: 2
  
  * goverment subsidy plus dumping to put everyone else out of business
  [Citation Needed]
  If anything, China has one the opposite of dumping, by severely restricting the export of refined rare earths.
  The USA went to the WTO twice last year to try and force China to increase their exports.
  China is the leader because they bought almost all the mining and refining capacity.
  The parent governments could have prevented the sales of their assets.
  Really anyone with money could have stopped them.
  
  --
  [Fuck Beta]
  o0t!
17. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by TheRaven64 · 2013-01-10 03:59 · Score: 2
  
  During the 1980s and 1990s DARPA poured tens of millions into research on robotics and automated vehicles, all for little effect. Then they offered a small fraction of their previous spending as a monetary prize for a specific result, and the result was rapid and revolutionary progress. Competition works.
  Or, to rephrase for those not completely ignorant of historical context:
  During the 1980s and 1990s, when computing power was still very limited, sensors were very expensive, sensor integration was an active and immature research area, DARPA put a lot of money into the kinds of project that would produce the physical devices and algorithms required for this kind of thing. Now that all of the building blocks exist as commodity off-the-shelf parts (many, in part, because of their DARPA funding for the early part of the R&D cycle), they are offering a lot less for something that is nearly ready for commercialisation, with the added incentive that a commercial product will rake in large amounts of money independent of the prize. For some reason, it's only now, after the prize was offered, that we're seeing things close to commercial solutions.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
18. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by EL_mal0 · 2013-01-10 04:25 · Score: 2
  
  Well, not really. According to TFA, the goals of the studies are to:
  
  Diversify Supply - enable new sources of critical materials that are not now commercially viable, improve the economics of processing existing sources, and identify new uses for co-products and by-products that do not currently contribute to the economics of materials production.
  Develop Substitutes - design and deploy replacement materials that have lower or zero critical materials content, and develop a knowledge-based approach to accelerate advanced material development and deployment.
  Improve Reuse and Recycling - both reduce demand and increase supply by developing economically viable technologies for efficient material use in manufacturing, recycling, and reuse.
  Conduct Crosscutting Research - develop theoretical, computational, and experimental tools necessary to support the basic science needs of the other focus areas; develop and apply strategies to assess and address environmental sustainability and the life cycle of new CMI developed materials and processes; and evaluate the social and economic viability of the CMI developed science and engineering solutions.
19. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by Immerman · 2013-01-10 05:16 · Score: 2
  
  Sure, it depends where you are in the cycle - mining and refining is not a cheap endeavor, there are considerable start-up costs. So a monopolist looking to maximize profits will tend to follow a cycle:
  1. Drop prices to near (or below) cost to drive everyone else out of business. This is especially easy to do if you have the backing of an economic superpower.
  2. Raise prices and reap profit until competition starts to come back
  3. When the competition is nearing the point of entering the market, GOTO 1
  Now I'm not claiming that is necessarily the (only) motivation behind China's behavior, but it's probably a major factor. Perhaps they really are trying to reduce their environmental impact, they're certainly starting to have to face some real ugly problems. The truth will be apparent in the details - are they cutting production or just exports (i.e. expanding their monopoly vertically)? And when substantial competition appears, will they increase production to drive them out of business? The threat of that will likely allow them to reap substantial profits for quite some time, regardless. Without substantial government backing it would be extremely risky for anyone else to try to enter the market at this point.
  And yeah, it's easy to stop a monopolist before they capture the market. Unless of course most of the players are far more concerned with quarterly earning reports than long-term strategic planning.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
20. Re:Viability of ocean mining? by the+gnat · 2013-01-10 05:55 · Score: 2
  
  If we passed the Fair Tax...
  Every time I read claims like this, I'm reminded of the central planners in communist regimes, who sincerely believed - with an almost religious fervor - that putting Marx's theories into practice would lead to explosive economic growth and a rapid increase in prosperity.
Politics by DaMattster · 2013-01-09 22:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's about high time that we have bipartisan support for energy independence. It's time for both political parties to pull their thumbs out of their collective arses and get it done!
1. Re:Politics by ShanghaiBill · 2013-01-09 22:57 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's about high time that we have bipartisan support for energy independence. It's time for both political parties to pull their thumbs out of their collective arses and get it done!
  It is being done. The USA is already self-sufficient in natural gas, and falling gas prices are causing gas to displace coal for electricity generation. Fracking technology, developed for gas, is now being applied to oil, with very successful results. By 2020 the USA is expected to surpass Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer in the world. All of this is because US politicians have done something that they have so often failed to do in the past: stay out of the way.
2. Re:Politics by Anonymous Coward · 2013-01-10 00:25 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Biggest oil (or even energy) producer != Energy independence
  We are so wasteful and inefficient that being #1 doesn't solve our problem since we're at or near #1 in consumption, waste and any other category you can think of.
3. Re:Politics by turp182 · 2013-01-10 00:51 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I agree on all points but that of oil. Fracking depends on high oil prices, otherwise it isn't economically viable (don't expect the price of gas or oil to come down). As well, those fracked wells show much faster production declines than traditional oil wells, on an individual basis they decline pretty fast. Environmental concerns are also pretty big, may as well be mining rare earths...
  For more info regarding fracking and the "more oil than Saudi Arabia" propaganda (at best that's what it is, at worst it is completely uninformed...), this article goes over the basics:
  http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9753
  The Oil Drum has many other more detailed articles as well.
  
  --
  BlameBillCosby.com
4. Re:Politics by turp182 · 2013-01-10 02:50 · Score: 2
  
  It's actually mostly science these days. Check out the headlines on the front page. There are several energy experts and drilling specialists (who are in the know with regards to old technology like fracking, it's been around for decades by the way) on the site. The Drumbeats can be "Malthusian" as you say, but they are supposed to be open forum discussions (good info on LED lights, insulation, you name it).
  And they don't cry "PEAK OIL" anymore. They mostly point out that energy prices cannot decline as the production methods being applied more and more these days aren't economically viable if the price of oil drops (fracking). And that these methods result in wells that decline fast and pollute.
  Do you consider oil to be an infinite resource? If not, when do you think production costs will become prohibitive for a large swath of the Earth's population to afford (excluding Africa, they are already mostly priced out)? That's what they discuss these days.
  
  --
  BlameBillCosby.com
5. Re:Politics by turp182 · 2013-01-10 05:46 · Score: 2
  
  I agree, but why would it have gone through the roof?
  I would posit that it would due to conventional oil production is in a state of decline or at best level outputs. Discoveries and new fields aren't covering the depletion gap, they haven't for some time. Here's a graph of discoveries versus production:
  http://www.forbes.com/pictures/efee45fmdh/oil-production-v-oil-discovery-2/
  Saudi Arabia claims to have a bunch of excess production (over the OPEC quotas). They have stated publicly that they want $100 per barrel oil. If oil went to $150 or higher, would Saudi/OPEC bring their excess capacity to the market? Could they (the key question, the only one that really matters)?
  Alternative oil fields help to keep a cap on oil prices but at the same time are dependent on oil prices being at a certain level where such oil production is economically feasible. That we are talking about such oil production at all is proof of "peak oil". Otherwise conventional (and much cheaper) oil production would be all that is needed.
  If Saudi/OPEC did have a bunch of excess capacity they could dump it on the market and crush alternative oil developments.
  The next couple of decades will be very interesting in my opinion...
  
  --
  BlameBillCosby.com
Alchemy! by Alex+Belits · 2013-01-09 22:56 · Score: 2

What? It's less idiotic than some things American politicians do.

--
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
i hope they succeed by mov_eax_eax · 2013-01-09 23:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

today works like this: bribe local authoritites and enslave miners in third world countries while destroying the environment, then let criminal organizations export them back to the us, like the blood diamonds; there is a huge black market out there.
Well funded R&D can bring us amazing advancements, I only hope this project succeeds and stops the illegal mining and the black market in the same vein of the synthetic latex.
Somebody didn't get the memo! by flightmaker · 2013-01-09 23:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

According to an article in Popular Mechanics (page 60, January 2013 issue) a company called Molycorp is running a re-opened rare earth mine in the Mojave Desert, forecasting "By mid 2013 the mine will have the capacity to produce 40,000 metric tons anually".
What about mining your own stuff ? by MACC · 2013-01-09 23:03 · Score: 3, Interesting

The US has sufficient resources.
see:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2012-raree.pdf
Political interest actually is about getting _cheap_ access to china's resources.
1. Re:What about mining your own stuff ? by Luckyo · 2013-01-09 23:11 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Political interest is also about not having to restart highly toxic rare earth mining at home with all the consequences that it brings.
2. Re:What about mining your own stuff ? by MACC · 2013-01-09 23:19 · Score: 2
  
  Political interest is also about not having to restart highly toxic rare earth mining at home with all the consequences that it brings.
  But China should bear the consequences without compensation or limitation?
  The US has ofloaded/ofshored significant elements of it's Carbon Footprint to China already.
3. Re:What about mining your own stuff ? by sound+vision · 2013-01-09 23:26 · Score: 2
  
  Carbon footprint is one thing, and that has global consequences. But the bigger toxicity of heavy metal mines and refining is from the *material itself*, and that contamination is more local. That is, if it's made in China, it stays (more) in China.
Shortage? You mean excessive waste. by Sait-kun · 2013-01-09 23:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

Instead of finding even more ways to strip the earth of all useful materials they should be investing in recycling used materials.
There are literally millions if not billions (in both weight/tons and in value) of rare earth materials in thrown away products around the world.
They should be investing in developing technologies to recycle old products and re-use as many of the materials as possible and not just the rare ones either as materials that are a plenty now will become rare if we continue to use and throw them away.
1. Re:Shortage? You mean excessive waste. by ledow · 2013-01-10 00:55 · Score: 2
  
  Good luck trawling through a motherboard (even a pristine, fully-working, but obsolete motherboard handed to you for nothing) and finding the rare-earths and extracting them back to a form, purity and volume that suppliers would take them from you to put back into products.
  You're literally assuming that it's like gold, or iron - just melt it down, scrape off the top and sell what's left. What if those rare-earths are modified to be part of a compound, fine nanostructure, device, etc.? It would literally take more energy to pull them out and back into a useable format than the entire thing cost to dig from a dwindling ore supply and make in the first place.
  You know what happens to more household waste put into a recycling bin in the UK (as exposed by various TV investigations)? It's shipped abroad and buried in landfill, if it even makes it that far. That's literally things like plastics and glass which are quite "easy" (relatively speaking) to separate, purify, reform, etc.
  Just how do you expect to reclaim the yttrium, say, from LED's in TV sets? Do you realise just what a percentage they make up and how spread out they are in even the largest of TV's?
  And if you know the model PERFECTLY and get every ounce of them back out, you're likely to end up requiring MILLIONS of devices to get it back to a saleable amount (not to mention it's poisonous to lungs, which adds whole new costs to its extraction and handling). But it's also the 28th most abundant element in the Earth's crust (so "rare earths" isn't what you might think). It's even difficult to separate from its own raw form, let alone reclaiming it - and there's probably more in your spleen now than in a TV sent to recycling.
  Recycling a material only makes sense when you can do so repeatedly (otherwise you end up making more and more concentrated rubbish), consistently and more cheaply than getting the original source. And all the things we routinely recycle we can do because of VOLUME. We dispose of millions of tons of paper or glass or plastic every year, and though it's not perfect or saleable in that form we dispose it, it takes little to make it so (in fact, collection is probably the greatest expense because of the volume it's available in).
  Rare earth recycling is pretty much pointless until it becomes, quite literally, like gold-dust. It has to be worth enough that someone just grabbing a couple of motherboards or old TV's off a scrapheap would be paid enough for their efforts through a resale price that makes it worthwhile. You can literally make a living scouring gold and platinum and even iron from junk and selling it on in volume. Doing so with rare earths is CENTURIES away, for even the rarest.
Maybe they are going to mint the platinum coin by elucido · 2013-01-09 23:59 · Score: 2

This would explain why they need to get all the precious metal.
They're NOT RARE by argStyopa · 2013-01-10 00:36 · Score: 4, Informative

From TFA:
"...CMI specifically plans to organize its efforts in four mutually supporting focus areas:
Diversify Supply
Develop Substitutes
Improve Reuse and Recycling
Conduct Crosscutting Research ..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Rare Earths aren't really rare in the sense of scarcity - they're about as common as lead or tin. They're "rare" in the sense that they're not found in veins or nuggets, they're found only by processing large quantities of materials (a usually complicated and toxic process that the US has largely farmed out to China because China's far more tolerant of environmental pollution). the article asserts that China controls 95% of the supplies of rare earths - I presume this means they currently produce 95% of the world's production, NOT that they sit on 95% of the world's reserves; two entirely different situations.
So aside from perhaps the first subject peripherally, as far as I can tell none of these points tries to substantively address that MAIN barrier to our 'supply' of "rare earths": regulatory reform to allow US firms to compete economically and viably with Chinese rare earth recovery companies. There must be an economic motivation if so many countries are nervous about China's lock on the processing capability, certainly?

--
-Styopa
Simple solution by Muad'Dave · 2013-01-10 00:51 · Score: 2

Simple, non-technical solution: Refuse to rely on a foreign source for materials deemed critical to the nation. Maintain your own production capability even when buying a cheaper foreign product (and stockpile if you must), but don't let your domestic production capability falter.

--
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Why not manage the recycling process as well by Tangential · 2013-01-10 00:57 · Score: 2

Seems like step number one is to stop sending anything with rare earths to Asia to be recycled.

Step 2 would be to try and attract foreign components containing rare earths here to be recycled. If its that important bite the bullet on not-cheap labor and other environmental issues (and develop better processes for doing it.)

At the same time of course, turn the geologists loose to find more.

--
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Re:Transmutation can be done by Moabz · 2013-01-10 01:10 · Score: 2

I am talking about a very different technology to produce the transmutations.

Mitsubishi made experiments which showed that Cs can be transmuted into Pr at low energies. The results were presented at a CERN colloquium last year http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379

Recenty Toyota (not Hitachi, my mistake) replicated the results, this was presented at the ANS winter meeting:

"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]."

http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf
Here's my suggestion, where are my $120M? by Ihlosi · 2013-01-10 01:48 · Score: 4, Informative

Just reopen the mines that were deemed unprofitable when China still flooded the market with "dirt cheap" rare earth metals.
Really. There's no actual shortage of the stuff. There's just a shortage of mines that produce them cheaper than China did back then. Market prices rise? Well, I guess those old unused mines might become profitable again.
Here is a thought by Dcnjoe60 · 2013-01-10 02:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

Here is a thought. The US is a capitalistic society. Why is the government funding this? If there is a resource shortage, isn't the private sector the solution? Or is it that the private sector is only the solution once all the hard stuff has been paid for by the taxpayer?