![]() ![]() Instead they are a common result of granites weathering over millions of years in a subtropical climate. What we’re finding out now, in this last couple of years, is that those ionic clays are not rare and most certainly are not restricted to China and the Burmese border. There are other domestic projects out there: Round Top has been talked about for a decade now and so on.īut while all this bickering on Capitol Hill has been playing out, the picture has changed. That’s the Mountain Pass lanthanides mine in California: it’s only closed down twice and gone bust once so far this century. We are now blessed with the Executive Order on Supply Chains, which results in MP Materials getting a handout. It does seem rather likely that a jet with that amount of magnets in it would remain stuck to the steel deck of the carrier no matter how hard the pilot tried to take off.īut you know how politicians get when they see an excuse to spend our taxes. It’s even been stated by some researchers that an F-35 stealth jet contains no less than 920 lbs of rare earths. The military has kept responding that the US doesn’t in fact use that many rare earths, the Pentagon uses only 1 per cent of what the US does and they’re just fine, thank you.īut people tend not to believe the brass hats, because some fairly mad-sounding figures get bandied about. Thus it is that DC politicians have been shouting at the Pentagon for years, insisting there be a bigger stockpile, more support for domestic miners and large subsidies. We definitely want more rare earths, and cheaper if possible: and China certainly seeks to use its position in the supply chain for its own ends. But being free of China for something so essential might even be worth it. Politics and subsidies, of course, lead to that nasty sucking sound from our pocketbooks. If we were going to break free, we’d just have to have subsidies so that suppliers outside China could compete on price. They had the cheapest, richest (much the same thing in mining) deposits. ![]() That’s why we were all stuck with their control of the market. ![]() We used to think – until maybe two years ago – that only China had ionic clay. You can get lanthanides from other minerals in other places, but it’s a lot more expensive. In fact most of the really fancy magnet metals all come from China and from this mineral. This is what China gets many of its rare earths from. The important source is called “ionic clay”. There are a number of different minerals we can get rare earths from – xenotime, bastnaesite, monazite and so on, but those are old school. Among other things they’re used to produce the powerful magnets so vital for the wind turbines and electric motors of the carbon-free future. You’ll also see them called lanthanides, and they are essential in the modern world. In fact rare earths are the series of metallic elements along that little separate bar at the bottom of the periodic table which we all forgot about after high school. The first two things to know about rare earths are that they’re not rare and they’re not earths – there, the only minerals joke you’ll ever need. ![]()
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