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