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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.'"
What could possibly go wrong? Japan's record of treating the ocean well is exemplary, right?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...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.
Capitalism means misery and endless war for the masses.
Also, Slashdort is a stinking pile of capitalist-imperialist pig propaganda!
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
"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.
This is exactly why not to base your currency on gold. If someone finds a huge new deposit, your currency goes in the toilet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
China in 50 years:
"Draaiiiinage!"
Oh glorious leader - peace be upon him. Amen.
China doesn't HAVE a "rare earth hegemony". You decided to let the Chinese mine their reserves and you keep yours.
Simple as that.
made to order. Mode me because you KNOW I'm right. /. is a US gov stooge site.
"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
so there not 'rare' after all lol scintists your a bunch of loosers
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.
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.
Seafloor mining has been talked about for decades, but hasnt gone anywhere. besides rare earths, there may be large concentrations of more conventional minerals.
All these years I was under the assumption
Rare Earth came from Motown.
Oh well.
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."
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?
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! :-)
they found the deposit by following the bass line of "i just want to celebrate". fortunately, they knew most of the lyrics.
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.