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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

I read "Rare Earths" are nor really rare. But the article did say extracting these elements cheaply causes a lot of environmental damage, which as we know, China is perfectly fine with.

I also read the US is close to opening a "mining" site for Rear Earths, but not sure where or for what elements.

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They are rare in the sense that they tend to be extremely diffuse, rather than having nice, massive veins of concentrated ore or elemental metal like you might find for copper or bauxite.

Since they tend to be diffuse, mining them requires disrupting significant volumes of earth and rock, plus the chemicals needed to separate them out of the less interesting material that gets dug up.

The cheapest way to do that is to strip mine large tracts of land and not reclaim or treat any water used in the process, which will likely be full of heavy metals and other chemicals.

If we don't like how other countries do it, we have to be willing to do it ourselves, which means years delayed supply chains (basically every mine in the US is protested and delayed through the legal system) and higher prices for the refined materials (it costs more to do it right).

It's called "liquid-liquid extraction" [1] and requires crushing the rock and mixing it with an extractant (see D2EHPA [2] which is also used in uranium extraction) into a nasty acidic slurry. It is then separated into a aqueous layer containing the waste and a nonpolar solvent that strips the rare earth elements bound up with the extractant. All the different rare earth elements then have to be separated out of the nonpolar solvent using even more toxic chemicals, each of which leaves behind a different hazardous waste.

Fun(?) fact: This process looks a lot like the alkali extraction process used to make cocaine, DMT, and a variety of other drugs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extracti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric_ac...

I'm not a chemist, but I have watched enough explosions&fire / extractions & ire to know this sounds about right.

The US has always had rare earth mines, but competition from low cost producers in China makes them economically unviable (and the US is market based, among other things). There is plenty of supply in developed countries, but being undercut by other producers require government subsidies or a more closed market to be viable.

If China refuses to export this stuff themselves, it actually makes these mines more economically viable. However, if they export the end products, they could still have problems.

Yeah China purposefully undermined the competition through state funding in order to control the market.

I doubt it was that, I think China's lack of environmental rule enforcement led to a condition that allowed for lower cost producers, the state didn't intend on controlling this market (or maybe some combination of that, but refusing to export in the future means they won't control the market anymore).

No, it's pretty clear that this was a top down effort to control the global market, a concerted effort by the state.

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-merges-three-rare-...

No, not at all. It is clear to you because you aren't looking at the entire history. But to anyone who has been in China for awhile, it is obvious that it happened overtime and wasn't intended. You are assuming China is an authoritarian country where state control is absolute, but in reality, China is a huge country where there are lots people making even if that means destroying the environment while the government isn't paying attention.

There are articles about this going back 20 years to the early 2000s I'm not just coming up with this thesis. It's been apparent for a long time. They had a natural advantage to begin with but they went much further.

Here is an actual concrete article you can read (vs. the ones you say exist that support your thesis): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China.

> In 2002, China's central government pushed forward restructuring of the domestic rare earth industry by creating two state-owned groups China Northern Rare Earth Group Company and China Southern Rare Earth Group Company.[14] This largely failed due to opposition from powerful local authorities and local producers.[14] Fierce competition in the local sector produced low profitability and inefficiency. This drove producers to consolidate and merge into larger companies for survival.[14] Market forces thus accomplished what central planning could not.

> As rare earth prices went up because of the restriction of export, many illegal mines were developed by organized criminals to benefit from the trade.[15] The smuggling by organized criminal groups is harmful to China's rare earth industry as it depletes resources rapidly, deflates prices and causes supply problems for local producers.[16] It is estimated a third of exports or 20 000 tonnes in 2008 were illegally exported from China.[16]

Now, if China had a central government controlled conspiracy to dominate rare earth elements over the last 20 years, the history between 2002 and 2008 wouldn't have turned out like that. What they have right now is a mess.

Look I understand countries are complicated and there are a lot of interests however I think that the Chinese government is totally capable of acting in a centralized way on a fixed target like mining (vs. something like semiconductors) when it believes it is a core national interest.

> however I think that the Chinese government is totally capable of acting in a centralized way on a fixed target like mining

Spend a couple weeks in China's hinterland and I'm sure that your opinion would change very quickly. There are good reasons semiconductors are concentrated in Beijing/Shanghai, but anything mining or natural resource related are going to be messy because China is a huge country and local government interests are often at odds with central government interests.

Yea people literally treat China as a hivemind. The same goes for other countries too. It's absolutely bizarre and often some sort of weird US centric mindset.

Part of it I even blame on US media, somehow, whenever there's something to discuss about in another country, even if it's some research breakthrough by a single individual presenting his work at a elementary school instead its "COUNTRY X CURES CANCER"

Are you saying the US is more centrally controlled than China? It seems that way but I don’t think that holds up.

The US states convened and created a constitution which granted a few explicit powers to the federal government and left everything else to the states. These rules cannot be changed by the federal government- only the states.

Whereas in China, a single party wrote the constitution, which enshrines power in themselves, and can be changed by this party whenever they want.

It isn't so different in how China thinks about the USA, even more so since our stark political divide is not familiar concept to many Chinese.

China does have an authoritarian government. And they literally own all the land. You can’t just extract rare earth metals from China without the CCPs blessing.

It is _that_ for steel. I don’t know about rare earth materials but it wouldn’t be a surprise.

I think it's important in the context of this discussion to separate the mining of rare earths and the processing thereof. Both are generally environmentally hazardous, but in different ways. The mining process generally involves strip mines or open pit mines (such as Mountain Pass in California, iirc the only US rare earth mine), neither of which are particularly friendly to the environment. The processing is also hazardous due to the chemicals and processes necessary to separate the component elements of the ores which are effectively more tightly coupled than is the case in most metal mines. Domestically that means continued and heightened investment in Mountain Pass as well as potentially other sites, but also the development of domestic processing industry. So while the mine might be in California we're going to see the ancillary industry popping up in locations with notably lower standards, i.e. Texas.

> environmental damage which China is perfectly fine with

“China has outsourced much of its rare earth mining industry to Myanmar’s Kachin state” https://news.mongabay.com/2022/08/toxic-rare-earth-mines-fue... (maybe overstated, but definitely a real issue).

> The mining areas in Kachin state are poorly regulated, undocumented, and “illegal under Myanmar’s laws,” says the report. Moreover, many mining areas are run by militias affiliated with the country’s military junta, which raises the risk of industry revenues providing income for the junta’s activities.

Remember, China insists this is good for society

Think of "rare" as "diluted" or "rarified", as opposed to "scarce".

California had a very large RE mine until it suffered a toxic waste spill and closed in 2002. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_mine#:~:text=The....

"Mountain Pass was acquired out of bankruptcy in July 2017 with the goal of reviving America's rare-earth industry.[16][17][18][19] MP Materials resumed mining and refining operations in January 2018"

I think another issue is that a lot of the various rare earths(maybe just the lanthanides?) are chemically similar and thus very difficult to isolate. In the end, a lot of this just boils down to establishing the production networks which takes time and a lot of money.

Does China primarily do this IN China? If so, where? I would guess West and/or north central?

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