We are trying to compete with China.
Recently economist Paul Krugman
complained that “China accounts for 97 percent of the world’s supply of minerals that play an essential role in many high-tech products, including military equipment.” He was writing about Rare Earth Elements (REE). There are 17 naturally occurring rare earth elements: yttrium, scandium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium. Not very familiar to most people, but they are used by us all every day. Some uses include liquid-crystal displays on computer monitors and televisions, fiber optic cables, magnets, glass polishing, DVD and USB drives in the computer, catalytic converters, and petroleum cracking catalysts, batteries (the Prius uses 10 pounds of lanthanum), fluorescent lights, missiles, jet engines, and satellites. In other words, these elements are critical to our high-technology world.
Despite the name “rare earths” the more common REE are each similar in crustal abundance to commonplace metals such as chromium, nickel, copper, zinc, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, or lead , but they rarely occur in economic concentrations, and that’s the problem.
