This is a somewhat interesting article about Rare Earth Elements on Geology.com. The part about how crucial rare earths are in common items like rechargeable batteries is not detailed. I think that is a key detail because the trend to use batteries and other rare earth bearing technology is going to increase dramatically in the next decade.
One story that comes to mind is about Molycorp at Mountain Pass, CA. I spent parts of a few summers across the highway fooling around in the Mojave high desert. Molycorp is one of the few economic rare earth mining companies in the US. They were shut down around the end of the time I was there.
Everything I heard about why the mine was shut down were rumors mostly from miners that wandered in to camp from the desert. The story was that the operation killed a number of endangered desert tortoises, a serious offense in liberal California. The result was that the mine was raided by federal SWAT and shut down, a bit overkill, even for that state. The conspiracy story I was told for the extreme shut down was because one of the Senators had an investment in a Chinese rare earths operation and that he strongly encouraged the action in order to reduce competition and line his pockets.
What I know about the story is that at one point I visited while they were in Care and Maintenance mode (basically not producing), they have been actively exploring the region for similar deposits for the past twenty years, and I talked to their mine geologist well after the first closure, suggesting that they had some kind of production.
It is unclear to me if any of the conspiracies have a grain of truth at the juicy center, but if they did, it seems like a pretty damning failure of national security to allow our country to be dependent on a foreign country for the sake of some rich senator's pocketbook.
No comments:
Post a Comment