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Major Find By Japanese Scientists May Threaten Chinese Rare Earth Hegemony
cold fjord writes "It looks like deep sea exploration may pay off big time as Japanese scientists have located rich deposits of rare earth elements on the sea floor in Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone waters, following up on their find two years ago of huge deposits of rare earths in mid-Pacific waters. The cumulative effect of these finds could significantly weaken Chinese control of 90% of the world supply of rare earth metals, which the Chinese have been using to flex their muscles. The concentration of rare earth metals in the Japanese find is astonishing: up to 6,500 ppm, versus 500-1,000 ppm for Chinese mines. The newly identified deposits are just 2-4 meters below sea floor which could make for relatively easy mining compared to the 10+ meters they were expecting... if they can get there. The fact that the deposits are 5,700 meters deep means there is just one or two little problems to resolve : 'A seabed oil field has been developed overseas at a depth of 3,000 meters. . . But the development of seabed resources at depths of more than 5,000 meters has no precedent, either at home or abroad. There remains a mountain of technological challenges, including how to withstand water pressure and ocean currents and how to process the mining products in the ocean, sources said.'"
...the Chinese don't have a monopoly exactly. They just undercut the prices any time anyone else tries to operate. I don't know why that wouldn't work against the Japanese as well. But the Chinese can't do it forever, and we all benefit from their cheap REM in the meantime.
They're simply called that. The reason why the Chinese has a huge monopoly is their cheap labor and lack of safety regulations. The US had plenty of mines for this stuff but they were shut down due to the cheap abundant supply.
We have plenty of rare earths in the USA. Only the absurd policies regarding treating thorium (which has a 14 billion year half life) as a dangerous nuclear waste, requiring prohibitively expensive disposal, keeps us from taking advantage of those resources. note: Coal fired power plants get to treat the radioactive nuclear material in their fly ash as a natural byproduct and so are completely unregulated.
That's basically space technology - building autonomous vehicles operating in extreme conditions doing useful work. Almost like space mining, although in a different environment. For the Japanese, this could be their equivalent of the Apollo project. I find it an interesting technical challenge. But you're right that if rare earth elements are the only thing to be extracted from these seabeds, they'll end up with huge piles of tailings. Well, I guess that would be one of the the tough tech problem to crack...
Ezekiel 23:20
See, for example, this article.
Seems like this just tells us the concentration, otherwise we already knew this in 2011.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/07/04/2058218/japanese-team-finds-new-source-of-rare-earth-elements
As apposed to the Chinese's serious care for environment or its minions on land.
T-minus 10 until China lays claim to this part of the ocean.
No surprise here. Its mostly scarcity promotions everywhere I look.
how to process the mining products in the ocean
Oh, that? By polluting a lot. :p
Can you point to a place in space that has the concentration of minerals you want, and is as easily and cheaply accessible as the ocean? Yeah, didn't think so. Put your Star Trek fantasies to rest, they will never happen. Just like the fantasies of manned communication satellites in the 1940s don't make sense because we have computers that fit in a grain of dust now.
And while it's not optimal by any means, at least the tailings will already be at the bottom of the ocean, so they won't have to dump them somewhere else.
I'm fairly sure that the reason China controls 90% of the market is because they're actually mining their deposits, not because they are the only ones who have deposits. I think there are plans in the U.S. to restart some mines, and surely this is the case elsewhere too. There was a time when it was very uneconomical to run these, so they were mothballed.
Cue China's claim these areas "have always belonged to China", like Senkaku Islands, in 3.. 2... 1...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
>> rich deposits of rare earth elements on the sea floor in Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone water
Good thing no one's ever disputed ownership of an island two-thousand miles away from the mainland, right?
Anyway, I thought the problem wasn't finding the deposits (they're everywhere, and rare earths aren't that "rare").
The problem here is competing with China's willingness to pollute the absolute living fuck out of their own back yard, to refine the ores cheaper than everyone else.
If Japan and the West wanted to do something REALLY useful -- find refining methods that are less polluting and resource intensive -- or find substitute substances and processes to avoid the need for rare earth metals completely.
The issue with rare earth metals has never been access to them, contrary to the article, but cost. If it were simply a matter of access, the United States, Australia and other nations have massive supplies. However, producers in those nations were driven out of business because the cost of extracting them in a clean, (relatively) environmentally friendly manner was simply not competitive with the Chinese, who can afford to undercut foreign producers due to their notoriously lax environmental regulations. Now this new methodology may be helpful in that it drives down the cost of production to become competitive again, but I am concerned that it may create tremendous environmental damage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gppi-O3a8
As long as they don't use nuclear power, I think we'll be alright.
So, you didn't read his comment at all did you? Just decided to go on an anti space-mining tirade because he mentioned it in a passing simile?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
A big use for rare-earth metals is making magnets for generators (eg. wind turbines).
No sig today...
Don't let them do it, they'll let out Godzilla!!!
Can you point to a place in space that has the concentration of minerals you want, and is as easily and cheaply accessible as the ocean?
Comparatively? Yes. We know that a significant portion of the asteroid belt bodies are M-type asteroids with very high concentration of iron and nickel. (Just try to imagine a 200 km-sized mountain of virtually pure iron.) If you're in space and need large volumes of structural materials for space use, an M-type asteroid is the place to go. After a certain point, it's going to be cheaper that lifting steel from Earth's gravity well.
Ezekiel 23:20
The problem with rare earths is that they are usually found in conjunction with radioactive ores, particularly containing thorium.
This makes recovery and refining a nasty and if you insist on environmental safety a quite expensive job.
China has been willing to do it on the cheap for the rest of the world. More recently they have realized that other nations have been exporting their environmental issue to China by buying cheap Chinese rare earths. This is coming to an end as China sensibly restricts exports of these materials.
I guess the problem lies in the ecological effect of possible dispersion of the materials over large areas of the ocean. It's not like finely-grained materials don't create a freely-floating suspension in water. Although I guess that one could say that you have to solve the problem anyway, otherwise the machines won't be able to see where they are working, due to all the turbidity around them.
Ezekiel 23:20
The fusion in every sun produces iron at the end, there will be plenty in the universe.
Recent advances in power electronics mean that Switched Reluctance motors are better for EVs and windmills, and cheaper.
http://powerelectronics.com/content/case-switched-reluctance-motors
http://www.radicalrc.com/blog/?p=2513
Not just generators, but a lot of electronics, especially HDDs.
I got here through a series of tubes
"The fact that the deposits are 5,700 meters deep ..."
Uh, not likely this will work out. There's no way that concentrations only about ~10x higher make up for the extreme expense of any mining operation at that kind of depth versus on land unless the deposits happen to be a mineralogy that is much, much easier to subsequently refine.
That's the plan, and we're ready to film it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831387/
They could wake up Godzilla
What a douche comment. You can't possibly know what might be found in all those asteroids. There is every reason to suspect that there are rare earths in some of them. There might even be a huge asteroid with such concentrations that it will satisfy our needs for the next thousand years. Exploration is what locates such things.
Obviously, you are opposed to space exploration. Is there a reason for that? Are you afraid of the unknown?
This is exactly why not to base your currency on gold. If someone finds a huge new deposit, your currency goes in the toilet.
Not only at the end, but continuously during it's life time. It accumulates and if too much iron has been produced : *boom*...there she goes.
But it accelerates towards the end that's right.
Finally another use for the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a ship built in the 70's under the guise of underwater mining but actully used by the CIA to raise a sunken sub. My daily dose of Irony is now complete.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8-Y-fIbqM
"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
Google "rare earth thorium regulation". Usually, anti-regulation whining like this gets plenty a mention in right-wing think tank-funded articles and political editorials.
This one gets YouTube propaganda from the thorium reactor proponents and some of their websites. Why is it that, at least in terms of web presence, the only people concerned about this care more about thorium than rare earth minerals?
godzilla 2013
It the only payout is the ore itself, then you are probably right. You are forgetting though that the technology invented for the task can be sold and I am sure such technology is very valuable.
No, he's not root - but he's been rooted by a fat hairy camel fucking jihadist. And, he likes it!
I know you're trolling, but actually considering the cost to lift a pound of iron (Around $10,000), there's a lot more than just mere dollars worth of stuff out there.
At the end of the process, not the end of the star.
Probably not news many people here are aware of, but China, and in some cases Russia, have been claiming islands owned and even occupied by Japan are theirs. Most significantly, China claims Okinawa and asserts that Okinawans are genetically Chinese.... therefore... well you get the idea.
What? There were no pencils in USSR?
Also, while uncle Milton said "magic" there, the original Reed story went even further, equating "invisible hand" with God Himself.
Which just goes to show how people gullible enough to buy into one fairytale will readily supplement it with another.
After all, magical thinking is magical thinking.
learn to spel
Bollocks. Just call the guys from "Bering Sea Gold". They will just get down there and suck up all the Rare Earths....all with the drama that we all love... Show name: "Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone Waters Rare Earths" , or JEEZWRE (working title)
Keep buying into the bullshit you get force fed by your politicians and payed for scientists.
THEY, yes I used the THEY word. Do not want lay men to have access to lots of free energy and raw material.
Because then we would do something about our slavery condition here on earth.
Japan is producing a heck of a lot of robots. Given the treasure they've just found I find it difficult to believe that they aren't already designing robots and robotic processes to do the mining for them and send up the refined material. There's plenty of experience out there in developing machinery for extreme environments so coupling that with their history of making robots I see them getting a mine going in very short time.
Are you afraid of the very real fact that no one will retire on Mars, no one will vacation on the Moon,
I thought we were talking about mining asteroids. Please try to stay focused. Tourism is limited only by what rich people can be convinced they want, and is rather different case than a business that needs to produce an economically feasible material.
China in 50 years:
"Draaiiiinage!"
Oh glorious leader - peace be upon him. Amen.
If you think "rare on earth" is in any way part of the point, you aren't paying any attention. People proposing mining asteroids aren't proposing returning the materials they mine to Earth.
The real catch isn't if it is possible but if it is economically feasible. Just like tar sands if the cost and energy required to extract it is too high then it might as well not exist.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
China doesn't HAVE a "rare earth hegemony". You decided to let the Chinese mine their reserves and you keep yours.
Simple as that.
Yeah, lifting a pound of feathers is relatively cheap. Coming from a different thread, putting a pound of aerogel into orbit would be almost free!
We still got 80 percent of this planet to exploit. ocean mining is easier. Also, we are more likely to have uploading tech before spam in a can can even get past mars.
The reaction rates for stuff involving carbon and heavier in something with density and temperature like that of the Sun is more than 10^100 smaller than the reaction rate for hydrogen fusion. This would require something like the Sun, but with the temperature and density unchanged, to burn hydrogen for ~10^55 years before a single carbon reaction is expected to happen once, and longer to get a single atom of iron from the thermal component of the plasma. This is based on the plasma with a thermal distribution, so in real life you will get a couple of atoms from cosmic rays or highly accelerated ions, but that is much more likely at the surface of the star.
So effectively, iron is not produced continuously during the lifetime. Reaction rates don't scale up linearly with density or temperature, so it is more like there is a point where the reaction suddenly turns on later in the star's life when the temperature and density increases. That is why there are processes like helium flashes and carbon detonations in stars, because the reaction rates ramp up so fast with relevant parameters.
made to order. Mode me because you KNOW I'm right. /. is a US gov stooge site.
Ignorant troll, I'll feed you. If you are in space you want to get the materials from space, i.e. somewhere with a gravity well that is not as bad as Earth. Maybe the moon is good. Asteroids will be useful due to Zero-G which may allow much lower cost exploitation, and many are nearer outer destinations. Plus we will spend more time on mapping asteroids that come near Earth which is a good side benefit spaceguard-wise. There exist ideas for exploitation of space resources that once started can be self-fulfilling and allow Man's leap into space. Yes, it started with Science Fiction. With Capitals. Or didn't you know satellites as communication relays is an idea first promoted by a Science Fiction writer? (Many of whom have scientific or technological backgrounds of their own)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
"Japanese scientists have located rich deposits of rare earth elements .. The cumulative effect of these finds could significantly weaken Chinese control of 90% of the world supply of rare earth metals, which the Chinese have been using to flex their muscles."
How is China forcing the US to buy cheap rare earth elements from China? link
AccountKiller
I was answering the ridiculous points in the Space Nutter's post. It can't be helped, when you wrestle with a pig you'll get covered in mud.
So which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of aerogel?
Who cares, my question is how did you fit an entire pound of aerogel in that room?
You know who else wanted to use Asteroid M?
Magneto.
If anything, a pound of aerogel would be more expensive. A pound is a pound, but the volume for a pound of super-aerogel must be the size of a barn.
They have lots of samples, so they have a pretty good idea of what can be found.
It's possible there are unexpected pockets of concentrations, but it's rather unlikely as those big rocks weren't formed in significant gravity wells that could cause the density based separations. Nor does it appear that they were formed with the same kind of thermal convection type actions that affected Earths geology either.
No, I'm not a geologist, but come on, don't people stay awake during the high school science classes? Or ever catch one of the various educational channels shows on the formation of the solar system?
The irony here burns the soul.
They're lucky there even was a Japanese nation after their behaviour in WW2. German and Japanese could well have become dead languages, with no one left to speak them.
It's unfortunate the article doesn't even mention the ecological/environmental "challenges"...
I fear China would much more likely do this to Japan than us to China, both because of the much higher complexity (larger territory, frontiers with many states) and of our real economical interest in maintaining China alive (you know, for you getting your next iPhone...)
Teach the giant squid!
Rare earth metals aren't that rare; the Chinese just put the rest of the world out of business by undercutting their prices and making it financially unfeasible for anybody else to make money in the business.
This is happening because the Chinese are illegally devaluing their currency and treating the peasantry worse than the Chinese Imperial Government ever did with respects to labor pay and work conditions.
I was making a Godzilla joke.
(1 pound) / (0.16 (mg / (cm^3))) = 2.8 m^3
Again the unfortunate name of this group of elements comes back to bite us. Rare earth elements are not rare, they simply don't occur in high concentrations. There are exploitable deposits all over the world, but nobody wants to mine them because the process of extracting what you're after makes a big mess. That made China the perfect place for RE production because until recently they didn't seem to care about that.
get it right, Gozirra came from the mountain, Mothra came from the ocean floor. Duh.
Seafloor mining has been talked about for decades, but hasnt gone anywhere. besides rare earths, there may be large concentrations of more conventional minerals.
Maybe you are thinking of Godzirra!
All these years I was under the assumption
Rare Earth came from Motown.
Oh well.
BREAKING NEWS....
American scientists have located huge rare earth deposits in California NOT under 4 miles of water.
This could spell the end of Chinese rare earth monopoly.
Details at 6PM.
So which weighs more, a pound of lead or a pound of aerogel? Who cares, my question is how did you fit an entire pound of aerogel in that room?
A pound of lead. No, really, unless you are weighing in a vacuum.
Think of weighing a pound of lead and a pound of wood underwater. The lower density of the wood and the weight of the water displaced makes for the difference. The same holds for air, but for most substances the difference is undetectable. However, lead vs aerogel is easily detectable. By my rough calculations, at room temperature, 1lb of lead weighs 0.99989418lb allowing for air displacement and 1lb of aerogel (at 1.9kg/m^3) weighs 0.368421053lb (and occupies 0.238732632m^3, so it'll fit in the room quite easily)
(Of course, to be ultra pedantic, I'm assuming you mean pound mass rather than pound force here)
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Compared China's record, it is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Chinese haven't been using "rare earth hegemony" to flex their muscles. The Chinese have correctly identified rare earths as an important strategic resource, and therefore aren't in a hurry to sell them at bargain basement prices to whoever wants them.
This of course, has put the people who like buying rare earths cheaply into a snit, and caused them to put their spin machine into action to demonize this as some kind of belligerent act.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Posts like these are part of why I enjoy Slashdot. Thanks! :)
Japan, Philippians, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and all other local Island Nations fall in Chinese territorial waters; Therefor, they are part of China. Also, China's Pacific economic zone includes Midway and the Hawaii Islands; Hence, China can fish-out those waters to feed China. Who pwns UBaby? CHINA!
Any attempts by Japan or others to mine rare earth metals in the China Sea [AKA: South Pacific] or the Pacific China economic expansion zone will be removed forcefully from the Pacific.
Have a very nice China Communist new year on April 1, and remember the China Sea is most all the Pacific.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
More likely they've found a lost Russian nuclear sub and this is their equivalent of Azorian.
We mostly build spacecraft out of titanium, not iron, no?
maybe the rare earth elements are not that rare after all. people just didn't look hard enough. we should all thank china for forcing the issue! :-)
Actually, some of the reporting of the prospects for asteroid mining does sound as if the reporters think that returning materials to Earth is part of the point. There's not a huge amount of point to reporting that your 200km "mountain of iron" contains several thousand tonnes of platinum or gold, other than to make people think about selling the "precious metal" on Earth.
I'm quite sure that the actual proponents of the schemes aren't particularly bothered by these reporting issues, but it does seem to interest reporters.
A quick brain check ... a 1km diameter asteroid (a much more reasonable size to consider - there are thousands or millions, but only a handful of 100km order asteroids) has a volume of 500 million cubic metres for a mass (if made of metals, density around 5 times water, similar to the bulk Earth) of around 2600 million tonnes. So, if you distributed, say a thousand tonnes of platinum through that mass, you'd still have to go through almost 2600 million tonnes of other stuff to get to it.
Mining "precious" metals generally isn't worth it, unless you're going to make at least some profit on the rest of the stuff you mine, or something has already done a lot of pre-concentration of the target mineral for you. Most gold production is, for example, a by-product of copper mining and processing (because the minerals are associated, and the gold follows the copper through processing, until the copper is improved to electrical standards, which throws the gold out in a pretty concentrated form).
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It's possible there are unexpected pockets of concentrations, but it's rather unlikely as those big rocks weren't formed in significant gravity wells that could cause the density based separations.
Some of them must have been. It's not like the metallic ones were formed by simple agglomeration of undifferentiated material. And even if the interesting stuff wasn't in the core, now flying around naked and in pieces, the other pieces (of the former crust of those large bodies, now destroyed) must still be out there somewhere. I wouldn't lose hope, there are thousands of these bodies, you never know what interesting things we're going to find there. Remember, nature is often more surprising than any fiction. ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
they found the deposit by following the bass line of "i just want to celebrate". fortunately, they knew most of the lyrics.
You have a good point if we're talking about fishing in the breakers or picking up driftwood along the beach. 5000 meters down is a much different story. It's not exactly just like picking up a rock from the bottom of the swimming pool, only deeper.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Actually, we can expect to find much higher concentrations of heavier elements in asteroids and other space debris than we do on Earth, thanks to this thing called "gravity". Neil deGrasse Tyson explains it very well in the conversation he had with Joe Rogan. Look it up on Youtube.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
A big part of it has nothing to do with scarcity of "rare earths". From what I recall, "rare earth" simply means it is rare to find them in concentrations such as deposits or veins and the like. It also has little to due with "resource" cost.
The mining cost, specifically the environmental cost of that mining is why China is #1. No one else whats to mortgage their environmental future.
Not only is it a very dirty to extract (see lots of extraction for little material), but in order to process (see sorting all that material for rare earth) it is also very dirty.
So there is plenty elsewhere but so long as China wants to do it and for cheap, let them.
As for the Japanese find... LOL!
A) It is underwater to the tune of 6000m, yeah that won't be massively expensive.
B) It is underwater, how much environmental impact do you think that will have? I'm going to go with more, particularly if the Japanese like fish or anything.
Why don't they just collect the magnets out of old hard drives? I have a ton of them...OK, not that much...yet.