China and Japan Covet the Same Rare-Earth Metals 159
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Australian: "Japan's increasingly frantic efforts to lead the world in green technology have put it on a collision course with the ambitions of China and dragged both government and industry into the murky realm of large-scale mineral smuggling."
Re:WOW! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Except the Chinese government is trying to control the market and shut down competition, and the Japanese government is ... doing something, presumably, but what isn't exactly clear from TFA. They could try to promote competition, but unsurprisingly, it doesn't sound like they're doing it.
Why is this news? (Score:2, Informative)
Rare-earths aren't only in China. China is simply making rare-earths available cheaper than it would be for countries to mine them themselves.
News flash: Japan imports nearly everything.
China's bastnasite and monazite supply for magnets (Score:5, Informative)
Lithium (presumably for lithium-ion electric car batteries) is not a rare-earth metal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element
Which element(s) are we fussing about? Why are they useful for green tech?
Lanthanum: very useful for green tech. Hydrogen fuel cell-related.
Hydrogen sponge alloys can contain lanthanum. These alloys are capable of storing up to 400 times their own volume of hydrogen gas in a reversible adsorption process. Heat energy is released
Cerium: maybe useful for green tech. Maybe motor magnets.
Cerium is used in alloys that are used to make permanent magnets.
Praseodymium: maybe marginally useful for green tech. Lightweight cars.
As an alloying agent with magnesium to create high-strength metals that are used in aircraft engines
Neodymium: very useful for green tech. Strong motor magnets.
Neodymium magnets are the strongest permanent magnets known.
Promethium: probably not useful for green tech.
Light sources.
Samarium: probably not useful for green tech.
Headphone magnets.
Alloys.
Europium: probably not useful for green tech.
Red color in CRTs.
Gadolinium: probably not useful for green tech.
Garnets.
CDs.
MRIs.
Terbium: marginally useful for green tech.
Solid state devices.
Alloys that respond strongly to a magnetic field. Sensor, actuator applications.
"Green" phosphors. Ha.
Dysprosium: very useful for green tech. Strong motor magnets.
* Neodymium-iron-boron magnets can have up to 6% of the neodymium substituted with dysprosium[15] to raise the coercivity for demanding applications such as drive motors for hybrid electric vehicles.
* This substitution would require up to 100 grams of dysprosium per hybrid car produced.
* Based on Toyota's projected 2 million units per year, the use of dysprosium in applications such as this would quickly exhaust the available supply of the metal. The dysprosium substitution may also be useful in other applications, as it improves the corrosion resistance of the magnets
* Currently, most dysprosium is being obtained from the ion-adsorption clay ores of southern China.
Holium: maybe useful for green tech.
Very strong magnets.
Cubic zirconia.
Lasers.
Erbium: useful for green tech, but probably not in the article's context, which was automotive.
Nuclear control rods.
Cubic zirconia.
Lasers.
Cryocoolers.
Thulium: scarce; probably not useful for green tech.
Superconductors.
Microwave equipment.
X-ray devices, in a nuclear reactor.
Ytterbium: useful for green tech, but probably not in the article's context, which was automotive.
Convert infrared light to electricity in solar cells.
X-ray source. Steel dopant.
Optics, lasers.
Lutetium: scarce; useful for green tech, but probably not in the article's context, which was automotive.
Catalyst in process of making OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes).
It turns out China (and to some extend Australia) are rich in these ores that contain lanthanum, neodymium, terbium, and dysprosium:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastnasite
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite
Other ores:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotime
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fergusonite
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadolinite
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euxenite
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycrase
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blomstrandine
The Australian News article is probably worrying over China controlling bastnasite and monazite, which notably have neodymium and dysprosium, which are used for magnets, which go in motors, which go in electric cars, which is a green tech. A car is pictured in the article.
Working the lanthanum angle wrt fuel cells seems less likely.
Also, an AC on /. that read Wikipedia is not a reliable source :)
What's the big deal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:NOW China really has the US by the balls (Score:3, Informative)
China is SHITTING itself that america might not be able to pay back all those debts, they recently became nervous about this and it's seen in them asking for reassurance that their investments are safe. After all america still has a military that could easily repell any hostile advances, so exactly what recourse do you think china is going to have if america really starts to pack it in? the USA will just tell china to wait for it's money like a good boy.
really it's in china's best interests to play nice with america as it's their number one customer, without them china's rise is finished as their own domestic demand can't support the double digit growth they have been enjoying (as seen in their 8% figure)
Re:Great! (Score:1, Informative)
My point wasn't that I disagreed with him, but that he's posting an opinion like it's fact.
At least it's breeding competition to do something good for once.
That's opinion twisted to sound like fact. If he read the article, (or even understood the summary) he'd realize that there's two things going on. 1) China's government is trying to lock up rare earth metals so that they can profit off of it politically. Since these are used in green technologies, this is bad environmentally. 2) This isn't really affecting the market, because there's a huge black market for the stuff. As shown by drugs, Prohibition, embargoes... black markets usually breed a lot of crime.
1) "Ginya Adachi, from the Japanese Rare Earth Association, said that China's dominance of rare earths would serve the developed world with a rude shock about global trade: Japan, America and Europe must now realise that some markets are not real, but political."
2) The Mafia during Prohibition [wikipedia.org]
Re:The supplies aren't in China (Score:3, Informative)
They do, but there's still more outside of China than inside.
China's military expansion of Lebensraum (Score:5, Informative)
BACKGROUND: From 1930's until 1945 Imperial Japan and Nazi-Germany were engaged in a militaristic expansion of their Lebensraum (lit. german expression meaning "living space for their own ethnicity") while attempting to grab foreign countries' natural resources to feed their industries (including the important military-industrial complex). This was in fact a "modern" replay of age-old imperialism and something that the most recent dominant empires, such as Britain, Russia and China had been at until then.
After WWII, (Soviet) Russia emerged as the greatest beneficiary in terms of imperial territory, while the recently democratized Britain had to begin surrendering the sovereignty of most of their empire's territory back to their native peoples.
Meanwhile the secretive and reclusive Chinese empire of Middle Kingdom, with its age-old imperial view of its neighbouring countries (of non-Chinese and non-sinicized peoples) as mere vassal states, was being taken over by Mao's communist dictatorship which uniquely combined the Marxist doctrines (like internationalism) with its own Han-Chinese chauvism (racial and cultural superiority akin to Nazi ideology).
Thus after the 1949 takeover of China by Mao the Soviet-backed "people's liberation" communist army was quickly sent to "liberate" and annex the vast territories of China's historical western neighbours, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs. Manchus in the north had at that point mostly been demographically assimilated already, despite Manchuria's widely recognized declaration of independence in 1932.
The sparsely populated and non-Chinese Central-Asian nations of Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs, however, were soon put under systematic colonial exploitation, including the sinister policy of settling massive numbers of uprooted Chinese settlers into the occupied territories in order to consolidate de facto Chinese imperial rule there for eternity.
TODAY: The territories of Tibetans, turkic Uighurs and (South) Mongols (as Northern Mongolia regained its independence from Soviet Union in 1991) have been integrated into the centrally-planned industrial system of the (formerly communist) nazional-socialist Chinese empire by the virtue of their massive exploitable natural resources such as oil, gas, water and vast deposits of precious and industrial minerals of all kinds. Native people are still an annoyance to be dealt with, mainly through policies of Han-chauvinist propaganda and systematic sinicization enforced through strict military control.
Here is one example article detailing China's ongoing industrial exploitation of the occupied territories. While this particular article doesn't refer to rare earth metals specifically, both South Mongolia and Tibet [highlandmining.com] are being mined for them.
China mines Tibet's rich resources [cnn.com]
Re:rare-earths (Score:5, Informative)
are only rare on Earth. Citation, please?
Actually, it was all said tongue in cheek. Having gotten that out of the way... As someone else pointed out, they're only considered "rare-earths" for historical reasons. I believe some of the platinum groups are less abundant; but, equally necessary to support our technology. In either case, the relative abundance of elements on Earth should be relatively similar throughout the inner solar system, with some tendancy for sorting by mass as the original cloud condensed to form the Sun and planets.
You do understand, of course, the astronomic (pun intended) price of the resources mined in the asteroid belt?
It's very high. Most of the cost is in launching the equipment and supplies needed. Then there's manpower and support. Consider NEO 433 Eros, a relatively easy target to which we have sent a robotic probe. It has a metal content which, by one estimate, is worth $20 Trillion (US) at current market prices. The technology and marketplace might not support a mining expedition to Eros right now; but, it's conceivable that in the near future a business case could be made for such an effort. Now consider that 433 Eros is only 3% metal content. Another example with higher metal content is 4660 Nereus. There are hundreds more which have orbits that bring them near Earth.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
Gallium for LEDs ....
Germanium for optics
Indium for LCDs
Rhodium for ???
Tantalum for Cellphones
These are the rare earth metals manufacturers are after, and they're running out.
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2009/04/26051202.jpg [gawker.com]