What exactly are they talking about when they say “rare earth?” Are they talking specific minerals? Yes, I could google this, but it comes back with stuff I don’t understand. Like, for example, why is rare earth only found some places (and don’t tell me “because it is rare!”). If it is just a collection of minerals, can the minerals not be found independently. Basically, I don’t understand what makes rare earth different from other things like gold or silver or diamonds or whatever.
Rare Earth
by John Cole| 92 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Tim
The Wikipedia entry on Rare Earth Elements is pretty concise.
JohnR
If I remember right, Lanthanides and Actinides in the old periodic table. Stuff that’s incredibly important for modern electronics and airframe/spacecraft construction. Stuff that’s found only in certain places on Earth. Stuff that China has been quietly locking up for the past couple decades. The neocons only see oil. China has been a bit more far-sighted.
Cris
Never met a girl that makes me feel the way that you do, it’s all right. Whenever I’m asked what makes my dreams real, I tell them you do, it’s outta sight.
Eric S.
A news story I heard some time back discussed this. It’s not so much that the minerals are rare as there are very few operating mines. That story mentioned a company, Molycorp, that was looking to restart a California mine that could produce rare earth minerals. There was another article today about a Australian company looking to open a mine in Indonesia.
RobertB
All those weird elements on the broken-out section of the periodic table. Lanthanum, neodymium, stuff like that.
Urza
Rare earths actually aren’t all that rare, its just that they come in such small quantities its hard to mine specifically for them.
Jim C.
Huh.
Well, in Star Control 2 “Rare Earth” elements are a decent level mineral resource. They trail “Exotics” (Weird SciFi stuff), “Radioactives” (Uranium and the like), and “Precious Metals” (Gold, Platinum, etc.) in terms of how good the resources are.
But they’re above four other categories of minerals (Noble Gasses, Base Metals, etc.) so overall they’re above average.
AliceBlue
Sheesh. At first I thought you were talking about the 1970s rock group. Anyone else remember “Get Ready” and “I’m Losing You”?
arthropod
“Rare earth” is shorthand for “rare earth metals” or “rare earth elements”. There are a bunch of them, many of which have various high-tech applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element
Stillwater
And how’d China end up with alla them? Was our nightwatchman asleep at the wheel?
mantis
Rare earth elements aren’t all that rare, actually. However, unlike a lot of other minerals, they are not usually found in large concentrations, but are dispersed more evenly in the ground. As such, they are “rare” in the sense that they are difficult to mine or otherwise exploit commercially.
There are currently 17 rare earth elements: Cerium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Europium, Gadolinium, Holmium, Lanthanum, Lutetium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Scandium, Terbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Yttrium.
The Bobs
I recommend the Wikipedia article as well. It is important to note that there are many deposits of these minerals. The Mountain Pass mine in California is a large deposit that is going to be reopened soon.
China monopolized the market because they have deposits that are low in thorium, the source of the radioactivity mentioned in the article. They also undercut everyone on price.
I disagree that they have been farsighted, they will now lose their monopoly, and the other deposits will reap the benefits of the escalated prices.
Zifnab
I think one good example is Cobalt. There are only a handful of cobalt mines in the world, but the mineral is necessary in the production of electric vehicle batteries.
AliceBlue
@Cris: Ya beat me to it. Rock on.
jwalden91lx
I’ll try to take a stab at this as a complete layman:
Precious Metals – Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc.
Rare-Earth Elements – Neodymium, Promethium, Holmium, etc
From what I understand, precious metals are rare – i.e. smaller deposits of them on (or in) the Earth, and Rare-Earth Metals are even scarcer elements than precious metals, making them not only harder to acquire, but more expensive as well.
All that is even before you get to applications. I got alot of that just from the wikipedia pages for “Rare Earth Metals” and “Precious Metals”.
meh
good explanation here
Poopyman
Well, here is the Wikipedia entry:
Dunno how detailed an explanation you want. The article you linked to indicates that Australia at least has some mineable REs and is refining them in Malaysia. I’d feel better if there were a much closer supply.
Violet
@Stillwater:
China has few problems with doing things like building roads, bridges, stadiums and so forth to “build friendships” with countries in, say, Africa. If that results in China locking up various mineral rights and increasing their access to oil, well, my goodness, isn’t that a fortuitous coincidence.
MonkeyBoy
They are probably talking about the really valuable ones. Probably Niobium and Tantalum which are a major cause of bloodshead in the Congo .
Morbo
Chortle, this post guest written by Megan McArdle.
kindness
Rechargeable batteries. Laptop, cell phone, ipod, ipad.
Zoe J
There is an excellent recent book on the periodic table of the elements, The Disappearing Spoon, that has a really nice section on the rare earths. I learned far more than I ever thought I wanted to know about the rare earths (and other topics) from this book, but that I am really happy I know now. Basically, they hang out together due to the way they arrange electrons, which makes them behave in similar ways.
Anon84
Here’s what you need to know about ‘Rare Earth’ minerals. Their mining and processing produces so much pollution that China has become concerned enough to start cutting back on production.
That’s like a pig farmer complaining about the smell comming from next door.
dmsilev
Rare earths aren’t actually all that rare. When they were first discovered, they were unusual, and the name stuck. The problem economically is that most of the mines for the things have been shut down, and there’s an enormous capital cost (and time cost) associated with reopening them. The mines are still there, and haven’t been played out, so if the costs get high enough, they can be reopened.
Funnily enough, this came up in conversation with my colleagues yesterday. We counted, and realized that in our little lab group, we’re studying compounds involving 6 different rare earth elements.
dms
MattR
@Morbo:
Heh. Although if this was true, it would have been filled with erroneous conclusions based on things not understood.
liberty60
I thought they were rare because the liberals won’t let us drill in ANWR.
p.s. Don’t give me any of that elite intellectual stuff- I know what I know, and don’t need any Gerorge Soros talking points.
p.s.s Also, Algore is fat.
Face
According to Huckabee, it means they’re from Kenya.
Poopyman
Completely off topic, PA Gov Corbett announced his budget. Included are some items that we’ve seen before in other states:
And the money shot:
JPL
OT…Just received a phone call from a Dick Morris organization that asked who I wanted to see beat Obama in 2012. I answered no one and hung up the phone. I’m regretting my decision, maybe I should have said Palin but who knows who was actually one the list. I didn’t wait that long. Be prepared if you are called.
MattF
Problems with rare earths have to do with their chemistry, their geology, and the environmental damage you suffer from mining them– rather than their ‘rare-earthiness’.
Also, the economics don’t really work– none of them is important enough to go ‘full-scale’, so mining and refining is relatively small-scale and expensive. And no one really needs any of them, so they’re almost not worth the trouble–typically, some metallurgist discovered that a little dab of neodymium made that magnet work a whole lot better. What to do if you can’t get neodymium is not the metallurgist’s problem
Poopyman
Also too, I did not know this (although alluded to by @Urza: )
Sentient Puddle
@Morbo:
Ah, but the difference is McArdle wouldn’t even acknowledge she doesn’t understand, and would just make shit up.
kth
@Cris: aaah, your love is fay-fay-fay-fay
Also:
Lizzy
They’re a group from the 60’s! I think I still have their album somewhere…
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Poopyman:
truly nauseating, i mean leave aside the whole argument about marcellus shale (private dick) that we should have had, now the crux of corbett’s argument is that we have to work harder to be exploited more, faster, for less. ruin our environment, take away our resources from future generations better than all those other states.
when teen sluts are called out for this exact behavior on maury povich, it is termed self-destructive, a death wish, and they are greatly shamed, their behavior is darkly titillating and satisfies a deep Schadenfreude that even the promise of youth is spoiled and the victim/guests are destroying that which the viewer would die for.
Dr. Squid
@Morbo: If it were written by McMegan, she go on about how she knows so much, then flap her yawp about chlorine.
Snayke
What they are has been answered enough, but if the U.S. can start mining for them again, we could be flush. Most production ended in the 1990s because China dominates the market. The government (DoD) buys it up from China because it’s so cheap.
I’ve heard from one mine owner that they tried to find a buyer and it turned out to be a Chinese-owned company in Canada. When they aren’t mining it, they’re buying it up, too.
Corner Stone
OT bleg, anyone have links to reports or studies done where a voucher program was introduced into an area and the private schools raised their rates to keep the status quo?
PurpleGirl
@Stillwater: Our corporate overloads decided it was cheaper to buy them from China than to mine them domestically.
Moonbatting Average
@Poopyman:
Corbett is such an asshole. Geologic formations have limited lateral extent. If the best Marcellus and Utica plays are in PA, then the gas companies will still drill there even if he taxes them a little. But of course he knows that.
Sentient Puddle
I also feel like this thread needs more Tom Lehrer.
jl
What I want to know is whether Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is a rare earth? I think it is, but then how could it be found on Planet X, since it is after all, a rare ‘earth’?
arguingwithsignposts
@Poopyman:
Shorter Corbett: That was a nice state you had there, shame something had to happen to it.
R-Jud
@Poopyman:
I will phone my Dad now, to see if he’s still employed…
Poopyman
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: @Moonbatting Average: @arguingwithsignposts: Just FYI, JC has opened a new post on Corbett and the frackin’ shale issue.
Poopyman
@R-Jud: I’m betting no decisions will be made until the end of this school year. For one thing, they’re probably in a state of shock right now, despite knowing Corbett was going to drop the hammer.
ETA: And what of our own Geg6?
amorphous
Screw rare earths, amorphous has his money in platinum group futures, specifically ruthenium. You just watch it skyrocket once it gets commercially applied in the semi industry. Just watch.
@MonkeyBoy: …Neither of which are rare earths but are transition metals.
El Cid
The US has quite a large supply of rare earth minerals. It’s just so much cheaper to get them from China that there isn’t much of an infrastructure to get it here.
The USGS estimates that the US possesses 1/3rd of China’s reserves, but China produces about 95%.
The dependence by world markets almost completely upon a single country whose consumption of those elements are even larger seems the kind of thing governments used to be leery of.
chopper
nomenclature. as mentioned above, it isn’t rarity, it’s how concentrated it is in the earth’s crust.
many precious metals can be found in veins of reasonable concentration, much of which is actually spread out in source rock and ore but concentrated in areas over time by biological action (gold is a good example). i don’t think rare earths benefit from that, so it’s harder to find and mine.
R-Jud
@Poopyman: If he coached football instead of track and field, I wouldn’t be worried. I hope Mom gets re-elected. Otherwise I’ll be making room in my office for them.
Lockwood
Zoe J (#22) pretty much hit the important point: they’re not all that rare, compared to many other elements, but they have very similar chemical properties. That latter point means that not only do normal earth processes concentrate them into naturally rich deposits, as with many other earth materials- ores- but industrially they are difficult to separate as well. However, even though they are similar, they do exhibit slightly different physical and electrical properties as components of manufactured material. So you can’t just substitute one for another.
The reason China currently has a lock on them is their environmental laws and enforcement is lax, but they’re still a pretty developed and industrial nation. They have the means to extract and refine REE’s, but undercut other producers to ignoring the awful environmental damage that come with doing it cheaply.
The problem is that China pretty much drove other producers out of business, then decided to limit exports, probably in hopes of encouraging more manufacturers to invest and build production sites there. But the materials and products that use REE’s are of enormous economic and strategic importance, and the idea of being at China’s mercy suddenly caught broad attention about a year ago. Thus the “crisis.”
Chad N Freude
For one US rare earth company’s expansion plans, see Molycorp Minerals. The CEO’s letter on the front page contains the following:
Read the last sentence. Several times.
elmo
@Sentient Puddle:
Thank you for doing that so I didn’t have to.
Tim in SF
Yay! Geek stuff at Balloon-Juice! My favorite type of post!
Speaking of Thorium, THIS is AWESOME. We should totally make these here.
Poopyman
@Chad N Freude: Verrrry interesting. Your tax dollars at work.
You know, I’d be OK with that if the taxpayers got a share of the company in exchange. But that would be … wrong?
chopper
@Lockwood:
well, lanthanides are chemically different than transition and main group elements, the 4f orbital acts a bit goofy. they’re chemically dissimilar. at least that’s what i remember from physics.
Librarian
@Cris: Fee fi fo fo fum, look out baby ’cause here I come.
Chad N Freude
@Poopyman: The point being that government financial support of anything that isn’t a corporate enterprise (you know, like people) is socia1ist and raises the deficit and all those other bad things.
Chad N Freude
@Poopyman: Giving federal money to Molycorp would create jobs, create middle class wealth, increase government revenues, etc. so the taxpayers would benefit big time.
LT
I’m sure someone has explained it by now, but having just written about this, these aren’t minerals, these are metals, in the periodic table sense of the word. Wiki has a good short description of why they’re called rare earth metals.
A cool fact, just because: All the metals on earth are older than the earth. And were, of course, made in stars (or in the supernovae of stars).
Citizen_X
As others have mentioned, the rare earth elements aren’t rare. They very commonly substitute for other elements (calcium, magnesium, etc.) in trace quantities in common minerals like feldspars.
Those occurrences are not economically recoverable, however. If you need to extract useful amounts of rare earth elements, you need actual rare-earth-rich minerals. There are literally hundreds of obscure rare earth minerals, but the most common ones are monazite and bastnaesite. These occur worldwide.
The Chinese have cornered the market because they have extremely rich deposits, and they have cheap costs (yeah, probably environmental regs are inadequate, but their labor costs are low, too). The Mountain Pass, CA deposits are also extremely rich. If China cut off the supply to the world, the price would rise to the point where the world would be able to afford to produce their own deposits, so I don’t see the point of the freakout.
Poopyman
@Chad N Freude: Where have I heard something like that before? Hmmmm….
celticdragonchick
Rare earth cations often don’t fit well into the crystal lattice of most common silicate minerals like the various feldspars etc. So, since they don’t play well with most minerals and are not rock forming elements in any sense (like Si, Al, Mg, Fe and oxygen), they tend to be some of the last things to precipitate out of an igneous melt. They are sometimes associated with really strange magma compositions like carbonatites (calc-alkaline rift zone volcanism).
LT
Gold and silver are metals, again, in the periodic table sense off the word. Diamond is not – it’s made of pure carbon – but carbon is a non-metal. There are in fact only a few non-metals. Even sodium is a metal.
“Metals” like steel are more properly called alloys – in steel’s case an iron alloy – a mix of an elemental metal or metals with other elements.
Citizen_X
@LT: All elements on earth are older than the earth, and–except hydrogen–were made in stars. Thus the Carl Sagan line about how we are “made of starstuff.”
Poopyman
@LT: … At least those higher on the chart than iron. IIRC, stellar interiors produce iron as the final step before the collapse.
But that’s just science and everybody knows metals were made a couple of hundred years before Jesus rode the dinosaurs.
LT
@Citizen_X: Well, yes, but it’s, for me anyway, more actually mindblowing that a gold or silver ring on someone’s finger is older than the planet.
Jinchi
The Economist has a pretty good summary of all the key points
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/09/rare-earth_metals:
LT
@Poopyman: I found it hard to understand the details on just how high it could go in the interior of stars. It seemed to be implied that it could only go as high as iron, then it required events like supernovas, or maybe the collision of stars, for the higher ones. In any case it was, as far as I understood, the early massive stars – that naturally have a shorter lifespan – that “seeded” the universe with metals (and other elements) that allowed for later starts, like our Sun, to be “metal-rich” stars. Sound about right?
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“China has been a bit more far-sighted.”
Not hard to beat the neo-cons: they’re like Mr. Magoo.
On Thorium: yep, looks good for the next generation of reactors.
Arclite
@Jim C.:
Daily Geek award to Jim, for referencing a 20 year old PC game.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
” All the metals on earth are older than the earth.”
Anything above helium is older than the earth. Except daughter products of radioactive decay, and those (mostly) came from something that was heavier.
Oh, and stuff that’s gotten hit by the odd cosmic ray, like Carbon-14.
But that carbon and oxygen and calcium and phosphorous and nitrogen and iron that you’re made of? >99.9% of it was made in the heart of a now-dead star.
The hydrogen in you’s been around from the Big Bang, though. Probably wonders when that carbon’s gonna get off its lawn.
There’s a great Primo Levi essay following the chemical changes in a single carbon atom in his “Periodic Table” collection of stories and essays.
Chad N Freude
@Citizen_X: The point of freaking out is that right now the Chinese have something we need right now!!!
buermann
They’re “rare” because they’re hard to extract, they’re some of the most abundant elements in earth but mining them is dirty, hard, dangerous work, and environmentally expensive. China has such a large share of the global market because they have abundant dirt cheap hard labor and no public feedback into decisions about where to dump the massive quantities of radioactive waste and toxic chemical byproducts produced from the extraction process.
There is no shortage of the stuff, there is no Chinese monopoly on production, and if prices go up it will allow shuttered mines to re-open or the world’s vast, vast trash heaps of tech junk to be recycled. Alternatively, we lower costs by letting producers poison more freely, bust unions, maybe employ some convict labor.
We could also stand to invest more into finding technological solutions for cleaner, more efficient mining and recycling processes for the stuff, and maybe repeating ad nauseum this scare story about the yellow menace will influence the DoD’s industrial policy and direct some of our super abundant public resources that way instead of towards more rube goldberg flying machines and silly anime inspired death delivery systems.
Simp
here is a great book recommendation for you John.
LT
The concept of extinct elements is pretty mindblowing, too. (Plutonium is believed – has been proven? – to have existed on Earth, and has naturally radiated itself out of existence in the 4.5 billion years we’ve been around.
They don’t have a Rainbow Warrior for plutonium, bigoted bastards.
different church-lady
I think it means Quadaffi has Yellowcake! Invade!!!
henqiguai
@AliceBlue (#8):
Yes, by the Temptations. Or were you referring to the much later coverage by Motown’s first mega-hit white group “The Rare Earth” ?
Yeah, pedantic and, probably, late. But who am I to pass up such easy low hanging fruit ?
Cheryl Rofer
There’s a fair bit of accurate information in this thread, and some not-so-accurate. (Cobalt is not a rare earth, for example.) John’s questions:
Starting with the last, I would recommend some of the reading that’s already been recommended on the periodic chart. A short answer is that what makes rare earths different is the same thing that makes iron different from cobalt, lead, oxygen, and all of them different from each other, namely the numbers of protons in the nucleus and the electrons orbiting the nucleus. As has been mentioned, the rare earths are useful in many high-tech applications.
The rare earths (should really be called metals rather than earths, that’s a long-ago misunderstanding from how chemistry developed from geology) include several metals, also called lanthanides from lanthanum, the first member of the series in the periodic table. The actinides are NOT rare earths. They tend to be found together in minerals and are fairly common as such things go.
They are found in particular places for the same reasons that gold, silver, and petroleum are found in particular places. The geologic history required to concentrate them is found only in those particular places. And a lot of that is not well understood.
The refining part is a bit complex because there are usually several rare earths in an ore, and frequently thorium is mixed in. Thorium is radioactive. The chemistry of the rare earths is similar enough that it’s fairly difficult to separate them, although methods have been worked out. It’s not really more damaging environmentally than any other mineral processing operation, which can be pretty bad if you’re not careful, fairly clean if you are. And the latter does cost more.
I helped to plan for the cleanup of a Soviet uranium-processing plant that was converted to rare earth refining and conversion to a more environmentally-friendly process. I’ve been wondering where they sit in all this furor; they were once the third-largest producer, IIRC. Probably should ask some of my colleagues there.
EAM
@LT (69): as @Herbal Infusion Bagger (72) partly points out, all elements except Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, and Beryllium were / have been made in stars of one kind or another. The first 4 above were formed as part of Big Bang nucleosynthesis (Hydrogen from previously unglued quarks, then the rest via fusions). Stars fuse the rest of the elements together, and also create Helium from Hydrogen. (Interestingly, Beryllium tends to be destroyed on average by stars — you can tie down part of cosmology if you can accurately measure the premordial Be abundance).
Fusing light elements into heavy elements takes place in the cores of the stars, and in most cases creates the energy that makes them shine. But for iron and heavier, fusing those elements takes energy from the star. Only very massive stars can generate the core pressures and temperatures needed to fuse iron, and once they do it is a quick dead end: the energy from the core no longer supports the star and it collapses on itself, fusing all the heavier elements and then exploding as a supernova.
4jkb4ia
@AliceBlue:
Yes, and both of those were Motown ripoffs.
/Technically this is not about the post
Brachiator
@4jkb4ia:
Not ripoffs. Motown was recycling company hits. And as any environmentalist knows, recycling is a good thing.
An original Rare Earth tune:
I just want to celebrate
Brachiator
By the way, people like to worry about peak oil. But peak helium is as big a deal. Rare, baby, rare.
Maxwel
The rare earths (lanthanides) have their valence electrons in the f (l=3) subshell. Transition metals (Fe, Cu , etc.) have theirs in d (l=2) orbitals.
Keith
@MonkeyBoy: You are putting some misinformation out there concerning econmically important sources of Niobium and Tantalum, (neither of which are rare earths BTW).
The major ore source for the element Nb is in South America, Brazil to be precise.
Tantalum tends to be yielded from African deposits, but overall volume production of Ta and Nb combined still has Brazil clearly leading. Moreover it isn’t the Congo, but rather Mozambique which is the most important African Ta producer.
There are economically important mineral commodities associated with political difficulties in the Congo, but they are mainly first-row transition metals, coinage or noble metals.
Certainly rare earths are not implicated in misdeeds in the Congo.
DPirate
Rare earth.
You can’t explain that!
folkbum
@Zoe J: Second Disappearing Spoon. Strongly.
polyorchnid octopunch
Well, read some of this. Two things: One, Rare Earth (the band) was kickass. Seriously kickass. They rock. If you don’t know who they are, you really owe it to yourself to check them out.
Two, rare earths are one of the categories in the periodic table of the elements, and it turns out they have properties that really rock for electronics. The one I’m most familiar with is neodymium, because of the truly salutary effect it has on the weight of drivers used in P.A. speakers, making them incredibly light compared to more old school materials for the magnets that form the core of the drivers in speakers. It also figures prominently in the transformers used in the new class “D” power amps. If you play in a local band, class “D” amplifiers plus neodymium speakers make for a very easy load in at the beginning of the night, and especially a very pleasant load out at the end of the night. You’re seriously looking at cutting out anywhere between three and six hundred pounds of weight out of a typical bar band PA.
Jim C.
@Arclite
I’m so happy someone actually knew the reference!
polyorchnid octopunch
@henqiguai: I was always more partial to Born to Wander, myself… but I’m Losing You is also sweet sweet sweet.
Catsy
@Arclite:
And one of the best ever made, IMNSHO.
Toys for Bob needs to make a new one. One that entirely disavows Accolade’s atrocious attempts at cashing in on the franchise without T4B.
Southern Beale
John, Wikipedia is your friend: