I think I've heard that hydrogen is somewhat hard to store because it reacts with some of the materials used with other gases. That obviously wouldn't apply to the noble gases.

I must have been wrong about the storage problems. I thought helium required special seals, because it escaped faster than other stored gasses, but I don't know where that thought came from, so I'm probably just wrong.

David -

p.s. Now I hate you because that song is stuck in my head.

The perils of reading my articles... heh. I was going to quote more of the song, then I realized that all you needed was "tweedley-dee, and tweedley-dum" to hear the whole song in your head...

:-)

Someone at HuffPost did castigate me for not attributing it to the Temptations, but the Rare Earth version was what I heard on the radio growing up...

-CW

Nice post on our efforts here at home and kudos on the reference to the band.

-David

p.s. Now I hate you because that song is stuck in my head.

From what I understand, helium is very easy to store..

All you need is a clown and a balloon... :D

In most cases you don't even need the clown... :D

OK, OK... I'm gonna try and get serious here. :D

Michale.....

The Wikipedia article on the national helium reserve says it was 1925 that it was started for airships, and then in the 1950s it "became an important source of coolant during the Space Race and Cold War." No in-line citation on that, though. And it says we've been getting rid of it, starting in '05.

Michale.....

I just looked over the comments, and it looks weird. Michale commented to dsws' [7] comment, but when I approved the new comment that had been held, it separated the response from what had provoked it.

Sorry, as this was due to my laziness in approving comments. Just wanted to clarify, in case etcgreen was wondering...

-CW

First off, welcome to the site! Your first comment was held for moderation, but from now on, you should be able to post comments and have them appear instantly. The only exception is if you post multiple links in the same comment, which automatically causes it to be held for moderation (to cut down on comment spam).

Thanks for the link, I will check it out. There is also another mine in Australia that (when I wrote the first article) was trying to reopen as well. And they're exploring mining rare earths in Alaska as well, but I don't know how far along they've gotten.

What strikes me about this is the military hardware supply chain. If we can't produce the raw materials for sophisticated electronics, then that (it seems to me) should be seen by the politicians as a threat to our national security.

-CW

Helium is also extremely tough to store, at least from what I've heard. Much harder than hydrogen.

Paula -

Ironically, recycling of computer components is a big business... in China. It's horrific for the workers, which is why most electronic waste is shipped there for separating into valuable components.

-CW

Sorry, couldn't resist... :D

Michale.....

I am amazed at the frequency that people dismiss the importance of rare earths to our world. In the U.S. there are typically less than 20 miners killed in accidents per year. In China the official number is 3,000 with human rights activists suggesting over 18,000 per year.

Solar, wind, EV's, computers, electronics, ..., all require rare earths. They are already playing a significant roll in throttling our progress for a Greener future.

http://etcgreen.com/blog/general/evs-and-hybrids-are-not-our-future

Anyone know whether these rare-earth elements are recyclable? When you think of all the computers and cell phones getting thrown away...

?

PS. I love the rare earth series in the periodic table, because it truly represented the time when they began running out of good names for newly-discovered elements...

Heh.

-CW

You just gotta love a song with a line in it like "Well, fee fee fi fi fo fo fum... look out baby, 'cause here I come..."

Heh.

dsws -

Read the original article from 2010, it's got a lot more solid info in it than this one. Check the links out, too, especially that graph of world production.

Rare earth elements aren't all that rare, true. Processing them is really tricky, though, and they aren't concentrated in all that many places in high-yield ore.

Here's an interesting tangent for you: when the Washington Monument in DC was built, they installed a pyramid on the top of it made from the most valuable metal of the day. Gold? Platinum? Nope... aluminum. Aluminum was devilishly hard to purify back then, and it was incredibly rare. Nowadays, we wrap fish in the stuff (even if we do still call it "tin" foil).

The Mountain Pass mine was pretty dirty. Through the 60s (to the 80s) the biggest market for the stuff was color TV tubes (apparently you could only get true red with rare earths). But the problem is that wherever the rare earths are found, it's usually in a transuranic deposit, which mean the tailings are going to be radioactive (another way to put it: they're usually near uranium deposits). The mine was discovered in the late 1940s (it is truly in the middle of freakin' nowhere) by a uranium prospector.

China lucked out, they were mining iron ore and realized that the tailings of the iron mine had tons of rare earths. So they were ALREADY mining the stuff (cuts down on overhead considerably when there's already a working mine digging the stuff out on the site), and they undercut everyone else's prices. Still doing it the old "dirty" way.

Mountain Pass closed down because they couldn't compete, I believe. But the new company is supposed to be "green" (I haven't researched this independently, so I'm just going on their press releases, which is always a suspect thing to do, I admit), and is promising things like a closed cycle for their liquids (so they don't spew salt water all over the place with heavy metals in it), and special containment areas for the tailings. Don't know how reliable they are, but they're at least presenting it as a "different way" of mining the stuff.

But cost and greenness aside, it's a strategic thing.

There is (or there was, last time I drove by it a few decades ago) a national "helium reserve" in the panhandle of Texas. You know why we're stockpiling helium? In case we need it for military blimps. You know, WWI technology. I'm not kidding.

If we can go to that effort to protect helium, then I think it is truly in our national interest to get this mine up and working again.

-CW

For those whose memories of high-school chemistry are a little hazy across the vast gulf of time that separates then from now, the rare-earth elements are what we learned as the "lanthanide series". There are those two rows separated from the rest of the periodic table, because if you put them in their proper place the table would be too wide. The very bottom row is the actinides: elements that you can't make a magnet out of, because they're too radioactive. The upper row of the separate piece is the lanthanides.

Scandium and yttrium also count as rare-earth elements, because they're found in the same minerals. But they don't have the same chemistry, and they're not used in rare-earth magnets and lasers and stuff.

I think I've heard that part of the reason China had a monopoly on rare-earths mining is the environmental contamination associated with mining and processing them. So it wasn't just a matter of China's predatory exploitation of its cheap labor and good ore deposit, but also a matter of us exporting externalities. In effect, we didn't want Americans to have to live with the consequences of rare-earths mining, but we didn't care if some Chinese people did. Or to put it differently, we could pay them to be poisoned a lot more cheaply than we could pay Americans to be poisoned. Dunno how much truth there is to that, nor where I read it.