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Rare Earth Mine Reopens - Triumph For Common Sense
by Ian R Thorpe.
Politicians and the science community rave about how carbon is destroying the planet. But what's the truth about how clean green energy will be. Rare earth metals used in digital devices, electric car batteries, wind turbines and many other processes that are being promoted as necessary to restart the global economy. Mining and refining the ores is a huge pollutant but new mining licences are being granted ever so quietly. This article tells why we need rare earth metals in spite of the environmentalists whines.

Rare Earth Mine Reopens - Triumph For Common Sense
by Ian R Thorpe.
2010-12-29
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: rare, earth, rare earth, metal, ore, oxide, mine, mining, technology, electronics, electric, car, batteries, wind, turbines, hard drives, cellphones, phones, economy, economic, metallic, chemical, elements

At remote, secret location somewhere in the badlands of the Mojave Desert there is activity once more around a long abandoned mine. The location is a not too well guarded secret. There are no sensitive military operations going on and nothing that could easily be stolen. The owners probably just don't want tourists and rubberneckers hanging around. It sounds like the beginning of a script for a Hollywood movie with Brad Pitt or Matt Damon pencilled in as male lead. This is real life however

Many people hope the mine might be the key to America's turning around the trend of the past two decades and starting reduce the dependence of its high tech industries, which once led the world, on foreign suppliers. This trend has been the main factor driving China's technological domination of the past decade.

At the bottom of the vast pit, under a pool of bright emerald-green water lies a rare earth, a seam of ores the names of which are not well known to the general public but which are the essential raw materials of many hi-tech industries on which, we are led to believe, the economic recovery of the western nations depends.

Green Lake, Lanzarote, Canary Islands. The water is rich in rare earth metals and similar to the water at the Mojave Desert mine (which I don't have pictures of) The mine is the largest rare earth outside China and contains many deposits belonging to a group of rare metallic chemical elements with consecutive atomic numbers of 57 to 71 inclusive (rare earth elements) These include Cerium (Ce) Dysprosium (Dy) Erbium (Er) Gadolinium (Gd) Lanthanum (La), with the atomic number 57 the first in the group and thus the element from which the collective name The Lanthranum series is derived and lutetium (Lu) As I said they are not names that often crop up in everyday conversation.

Such elements and the others in the series between atomic weights 57 and 71 are used in processes deemed vital for the future economic security of the west. Lanthanum is essential for batteries used in electric and hybrid cars, neodymium is vital to the alloys that make permanent magnets for wind turbines, especially the kind of turbines suitable for offshore wind farms. Europium is a component of energy efficient lighting equipment.

When the special conductivity properties of rare earth metals was first identified in the 1930s these metals were truly rare. There were few known locations where they could be found and isolating them from other materials (often copper oxides) that are found in the same locations was a difficult, expensive and time consuming task. Many more workable deposits have now been identified and some industry analysts say "rare earths" are no longer truly rare. Rareness is a very relative quality however and though we are aware of far greater stocks while refining processes have been greatly simplified, demand has grown much more quickly than output.

Such is the anxiety of technology corporations about the security of their supplies a new industry in reclaiming materials in the Lanthranum series has sprung up. Hitachi recently started a new division to recover rare earths from hard drives and other materials, others, General Electric among them, are urgently trying to diversify the sources of rare earths they rely on. There is another problem however. It is unclear whether western nations still have the expertise to manage the process of turning raw minerals into usable clean hi - tech components.

So why was the mine shut down eight years ago if it is so important? And why were the hi - tech skills allowed to migrate to Asia. Two reasons as far as anyone knows, firstly it was because of pressure from environmentalists; the business of mining the ore and extracting the rare elements from it is incredibly carbon intensive and dirty; secondly it represented an understanding in the board rooms of global corporations that the USA, Canada, Japan and Europe could no longer compete with China as industrial nations. Again this was partly due to pressure from the green lobby. Rare earths are extracted through opencast mining and the refining process generates carbon emissions, toxic metal waste and radioactive waste. According to environmentalists the Mojave desert is an environmentally sensitive area. I am not disputing that, simply pointing out the Catch 22 situation the green movement has put western governments in.

Now things have changed and the owners of the mine have won final approval to resume mining operations. If things go to plan the mine will be in production soon. "We will probably never be the largest rare earth mine in the world again but we do think we will be a very significant supplier," Mark Smith, chief executive of owners Molycorp Minerals told media representatives during a press day at the site.

Rather perversely one might think, the Obama administration, the greenest administration American will now never have, cannot wait for the mine to begin shipping out rare elements. Every pound of metallic oxide processed and packaged by the mine is a few hundred dollars less on the monthly public deficit, toxic and radio active waste be damned.. A US department of energy report warned on 15 December that without mines such as this America risks losing its lead in a host of technologies, from smart phones to electric car batteries to wind turbines, because of a virtual Chinese monopoly on the rare earth metals essential to their production. Whether the U.S. actually ever had the lead in these technologies is debatable (Finland and Sweden through Nokia and Eriksson led in cellphone technology and Apple's gadgets are mot manufactured in the USA) but the department has a strong point.

China controls 97% of current global rare earth metals production partly because large deposits exist under Chinese territory, partly because of Beijing's rapidly increasing influence in Africa, South America and South East Asia and partly because environmental activists in the western nations have inhibited democratic governments from granting operator licences to producers. Such total domination of a strategic resource became impossible to ignore in October when China cut exports of rare earth elements by more than 70% over the previous year, disrupting manufacturing in Japan, Europe and the USA. Prices of many of the 17 rare earth elements rose by 40% or more. Geological surveys estimate that China actually has 37% of the total rare earth resources under its bedrock. A specific source, The British Geological Survey (BGS) in a report on the elements published this year estimates that besides China's reserves the former Soviet bloc has around 19m tonnes and the US 13m, with other large deposits held by Australia, Canada, India, Brazil, southern and eastern Africa and Malaysia. Deposits are thought to exist in Greenland and Antarctica.

Molycorp say they have been lobbying for two years to get the Nevada mine reopened. Washington is eager to cooperate now. Why? Because one consequence of the Chinese ability to hold a 44 Magnum to America's head has been the decision that Beijing would no longer accept payment of interest due on its holdings of US Treasury bonds in cash. The Chinese wanted gold. US gold reserves were low which meant the Fed had to buy gold in the international markets. And guess who was selling gold, which nation had big enough stocks of the yellow stuff they could exploit the sellers market by driving the price up? ................. Well done, but you don't get a prize.

Experts predict global demand for rare earths will reach 205,000 tonnes by 2015. So long as China holds a virtual monopoly in the commodities they will control the market and dictate the price. The likely consequences of that became clear in autumn when the Chinese began tightening export quotas exports of rare earth minerals.

"If we don't get alternative supplies up and running we are going to have this supply gap and it is going to cause a lot of issues," said Mark Smith when he met the media.

There has been speculation that China is trying to use its control over the supply lines for political advantage. A number of experts however see China trying to get greater control over an expensive, dirty and dangerous mining process, and to get more companies to set up shop inside its borders. A report from industry analysts Technology Metal Research suggests China's activities are not driven by hostility but by a rapidly expanding domestic market which can only be supplied if exports of essential materials are limited.

Thus it is clear the west must either decide to sit back and let the developing nation overtake us not just in terms of national economics but also in personal wealth and living standards or we, and that 'we' really means USA, Canada and Australia as the nations that are sitting on reserves and can wield political clout, must be willing to ignore the waily, gnashy - teethy noises of the greensand 'liberals' and start extracting the materials industry needs from deposits that are not currently being exploited.

By mid-2012, Molycorp aims to be producing a total of 20,000 tonnes a year of nine of the 17 rare earths, about 25% of what the west west imports from China. Press releases suggest the company might increase production to 40,000 tonnes within two years of the mine going into production. So far, according to Molycorp press releases the company has exposed only 50 acres of the 2,000 acre site.

But even production on that scale and the hole it makes in the Mojave Desert may not be enough to get us out of the supply / demand hole so to speak. To guarantee the supply of metals needed to move to a 'clean' energy economy: lanthanum for electric car batteries, neodymium for wind turbines, europium for low energy lighting etc. would need seven mines the size of Molycorp's. Just to meet the demand for wind turbines would mean no neodymium for motors or any other applications, according to Jim Hedrick, who until last year was the rare earth expert at the US Geological Survey. There is a demand for 10 or 20 mines through the world to meet all the different demands for these products according to industry experts.

The question facing western voters then is do we continue to listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth from those control freaks who call themselves liberals but are not so much keen to achieve 'the greatest good of the greatest number' as to be seen to be kind, caring people. Shutting down western industry will not help the poor either in the developed nations or the third world, in fact it will harm them. A tightening of purse strings in western homes will mean shoppers cut out exotic foods and buy budget brands instead of fair trade products. Imposing punitive taxes on the rich will not raise any revenue if the sources of income on which the rich rely for their wealth are cut off. And will the people in the middle be thankful if they are persuaded to sacrifice their prosperity for the sake of the planet only to find the planet will not be saved because the polluting industries along with western prosperity have simply moved east.

It is time for objectivity and realism. Opening the Mojave Desert mine will make the gun being held to our heads look slightly more like a .38 than a .44. If we keep moving in the right direction it will eventually be reduced to a peashooter. We can all play our part if we get used to paying a little more for goods manufactured in the west so the costs of cleaning up the mess industry make can be covered, if we demand a little less and make things last longer and if we learn to appreciate what nature gives us.

Alternatively we can cull about a half of the population and in one painful lurch return to a pre - industrial lifestyle. Well, which is it to be?

ESSENTIAL READING.
Rare Earth Elements: A Beginners Guide
Information on the chemical nature, physical properties and uses of rare earth metals.

Rare Earth Elements And Their Uses
Information on mining, extraction and refining processes.

Rare Earths In Nanotechnology
Specalised industrial applications that depend on rare earths.

The Periodic Table - How It Puts People Off Chemistry

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Fancy A Laugh? Here's a good story. A new scientific study says wind farms can cause climate change. The new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures. Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools. Simples. But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere ...

ILO warns global employment situation is 'alarming'; Eurozone in crisis:
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has reported that the global employment situation is "alarming" and unlikely to improve soon. The agency said that austerity measures, especially in advanced economies, were hurting job creation and the situation was likely to get worse amid slowing global growth and more people entering the workforce. They have a point of course but it is just not feasible to keep borrowing money to pay for ...

Things Must Be Pretty Bad When Primark Fakes Are Selling In Dubai
Fake Christian Louboutin shoes I can understand although those wanting to plug such crap in my comments thread can eff off, I'll just delete you. Fake Louis Vuitton bags, Dolce and Gabbana wossits, ...

Boggart Blog Select vol 1
Boggart Blog styles itself "probably the funniest blog on the web" and most of its loyal band of followers would say that is an understatement. It is not just the wit of the Boggart Blog team or the style and skill with the written word they bring to their humour but the range. From sharp political satire they will leap to wild, surreal fantasy, dark, almost cruel ironies, incisive parody and ...

Bank of England's Disastrous Quantitative Easing Policy Destroying Pensions and Lives
Big News today is that the shortfall in the final-salary pensions schemes of the FTSE 350 companies has risen to £80bn at the end of last month, four times higher than at the same point last year according to pensions analysts Hymans Robertson. The figures expose the extent to which repeated rounds of quantitative easing (QE a.k.a.creating money in computers) has distorted the value of ...

Argentina's Lightweight Government Throws Its Weight About
The government of Argentina, still deluding itself that the Falkland Islands belong to them, has threatened to press criminal and civil charges on British oil companies exploring off the Falkland Islands if they do not "justify their actions" by a May 2 deadline. In its latest display of megalomaniacal lunacy over the disputed islands, The Government of Argentina said it had ...

Spain's Jobless Hits New Record
Nearly one in four Spaniards are now out of work, according to figures released by the government on today, as Standard & Poor's cut the country's credit rating by two notches over its debt burden and ailing banks. The number of unemployed people hit 5,639,500 for March, with the unemployment rate reaching 24.4%, the national statistics agency reported.The figures came on the same day as rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded Spanish sovereign debt ...

The Folly Of Trying To Inflate Away Debt
As the debt crisis grinds on and the creit crunch mutates into the credit famine the clueless politicians and even more clueless economists and academics who advise them can only think of one course of action. That is to inflate away their debt problem by devaluing currency to the extent at whic a bag of potatoes or wheat grain costs $£€ 1 trillion. Inflation is the cruellest tax, destroying the savings and pensions of sensible people and rewarding irresponsibility.

Asinine Eurocrats Want To Waste More Of Our Money
On reading the news about the Bureaucrats of Brussels, those smug, smooth faced spawn of a pox whore's scab lice who control our distiny and their demand for a budget increase of twice the official inflation rate after ...

Meanwhile As Punters Suffer Brussels Bureaucrats Throw Away Money As If It Is Infected
European Commission bureaucrats have squandered millions of pounds on bizarre projects that provide little or no benefit to member states, it has been revealed. Wasteful schemes include spending £20m on building three ports in Spain and Italy that remain unused four years after their completion and sending a ‘blogging donkey’ equipped with a solar panel and a video camera around Europe as part of ...

The Demon Stagflation Is On The Loose
The Credit Crunch is stil crunching European economies and the savings and pension funds of individuals.Demand for housing loans has falled 70pc in Portugal, 44pc in Italy, and 42pc in the Netherlands in the first quarter of 2012. Enterprise loans fell 38pc in Italy. This puts a rather different perspective on the UL Labour Party's outraged squealing about our economy contracting one fifth of one per cent over the last ...

Mathematics and Reality
In all of our blogs and web sites the Greenteeth team have been critical of those science fans who are turning science into a religion. Scientists deny this of course even in the face of the evidence. Here Ian R Thorpe shows you that the idea of mathematics as God is nothing new, it has been around longer than Christianity in fact.

Cameron Gazes Into The Abyss
At Prime Minister's questioin time today David Cameron was given a threashing the like of which he had not experienced since he was at his very posh school, and he did not enjoy it. After less than 10 minutes of suffering "the slings and arrows of outraged MPs from members of his own and opposition parties, the Prime Minister looked like a pit bull with piles. The Leverson inquiry ...

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COMMENTS AND RECOMMENDED READING AROUND THE WEB

In this section we do not necessarily support the views expressed in linked articles but try to give a coss section of interesting and well written articles that we think are likely to stir things up a bit.

COMMENT:
(A random and ecletic mix of what we thought was worth reading recently)

The Question That Wob't Go Away: Who Is Barack Obama?
So now Chris Matthews isn’t the only one experiencing a little thrill when he thinks about Barack (omit middle name) Obama. The recent revelation that from the early 1990s until the day before yesterday—or, to be more accurate, until Obama made his decision to run for president—a biographical pamphlet circulated by his literary agents described him as having been “born in Kenya” has been setting the world of ...

How The Grexit May Make Things Worse In Greece
It looks more likely that Greece will crash out of the euro. But if it attempts to return to the drachma, there's a pretty big problem, which no one's really come up with a way to fix. The printers at De La Rue or its rivals are, according to reports, preparing to run off some new Greek banknotes ...

Is America Really A Post White Nation or Is This Writer Spouting Typical Progressive Claptrap When is a majority less than a majority? Answer: when the minority is bigger. This is what has just happened in the US: births to the white majority in America fell in the first six months of last year to just 49.6 per cent of the total, meaning that Caucasians, as they are quaintly known, may within the next 30 years become an endangered species.Given America’s boast that it is a land of ...

The New Reactionaries by Victor Davis Hanson, Pajamas Media
About fifteen years ago, many liberals began to self-identify as progressives—partly because of the implosion of the Great Society and the Reagan reaction that had tarnished the liberal brand and left it as something akin to “permissive” or “naïve,” partly because “progressive” was supposedly ...

Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study
Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.

I Promise You The President Has A Big Stick says vice president
Vice President Joe Biden went after presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a campaign address at New York University, questioning the former Massachusetts governor’s chops on foreign policy. And, he was there to try to prop up his boss’ credentials ....

Minimum Alcohol Pricing Shambles by Dick Puddlecote
You have to wonder if UK politicians who have been promoting minimum alcohol pricing might have been a bit pissed when they made the decision to go for it. Consider this response to a parliamentary question tabled by a UKIP member of the House of Lords ...

Asinine bureaucrats
I shared Gildas’ rage yesterday; he fared better than I, he was actually able to articulate his rage. PMQs left me quite speechless and I abandoned the effort to write.PMQs has become a monotonously unfolding pantomime of ...

A Spectacular Devaluation But no Recovery In Sight
The sterling effective exchange rate is one reason why the UK has recorded the highest inflation rate of any advanced economy. With the onset of the crisis, the Bank of England allowed sterling to depreciate dramatically ...

Salt Tax Again
Salt is now the same as tobacco. Soon there will never be a heart attack again, anywhere in the world, and the drones will live in morose greyness for all eternity. Well, I like tobacco, but I won’t die if I can’t get any. It’s a fun part of life ...

Obama Message Booed ~ In Massachusetts (by Allahpundit)
Well, it stands to reason. Massachusetts is a deep red state. Wait, what?
I held off blogging this yesterday in hopes that video would emerge but after almost 24 hours I’ve given up hope. It started when Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom tweeted: ...

The second front - the new fear and panic tactic to replace AGW
Apr 22, 2012 Greens If the struggle to put climatology back on a scientific footing were not bad enough, the UN has just set up a new intergovernmental body, which will push biodiversity as the new excuse to "scare 'n' tax".

Inequality: a middle-class obsession by Daniel Ben-Ami
Unlike past warriors for equality, today’s campaigners simply dislike both the super-rich and ‘trailer trash’.

Executive Order 13547: “The Sleeping Power Grab” (by Erika Johnsen)
To be fair, President Obama’s executive-order output hasn’t unreasonably outpaced that of his predecessors – his especial willingness to actively circumvent Congress and snatch huge gobs of power for the federal bureaucracy only makes it feel like he has. In July of 2010, President Obama signed executive order 13547 – “Stewardship of ...

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