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| rare earth usage |
Obama Blasts China in WTO Complaint, China Claims it Can't Stop Hoarding: The economic leadership of China is either brilliant or diabolical, depending on your perspective. The world's fastest growing economy is accelerating its high-tech efforts at a breakneck pace, thanks to heavy government subsidizing and a favorable regulatory atmosphere that gives domestic competitors advantages over their foreign peers. They better start while they have a market unless they are using it all on their rapidly growing and developing military. Regardless their edge will not last much longer!
China's rare earth policy justified: China's restrictions on rare earth exports are justified and are in line with World Trade Organization rules, Shen Danyang, spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said Thursday."The policy aims to protect resources and environment, and realize sustainable development. China has no intention of restricting free trade or protecting domestic industries by distorting its foreign trade," Shen said at a regular press conference.
Faced with mounting resource and environment pressures, the government has restricted the development of heavy energy consumption, heavy pollution and resource-related industries in recent years, which helped promote not only the country's scientific development but also the world's sustainable growth, Shen said. On Tuesday, the European Union, United States and Japan formally asked the WTO to settle a dispute with China over restrictions placed on exports of raw materials including rare earth elements. The country supplies more than 90 percent of rare earth products on the global market, but its reserves only account for about one-third of the world's total. Disorderly mining of rare earths has been blamed for environmental damage in rare-earth-rich regions across China. Yeah right China is worried about pollution, since when?
Ever since we gave up our dominance of the critical rare minerals used in today's high tech equipment China has held a monopoly and held the high tech world predominantly Japan and the US hostage. Their dominance never should have been allowed and is about to end.
Japan finds rare earths in Pacific seabed: Japanese researchers say they have discovered vast deposits of rare earth minerals, used in many hi-tech appliances, in the seabed. The geologists estimate that there are about a 100bn tons of the rare elements in the mud of the Pacific Ocean floor. At present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals. Analysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable.
Rare earth mine in US reopened: At one point, the majority of the world's rare earths were mined at the Mountain Pass facility. Then, in 1998, Molycorp halted chemical processing at the mine following an environmental disaster; radioactive wastewater flooded the nearby Ivanpah Dry Lake. At the same time, China was dramatically increasing its rare earth production.The resulting lower market prices forced Molycorp to close their mine in 2002. Although Molycorp has continued to extract metals from stockpiles of ore mined at Mountain Pass, China now produces between 96% and 99% of the world's total rare earth supply. The government carefully allocates supply to individual companies to support domestic electronics production. In 2009, they cut export quotas of rare earths from 50,000 to 30,000 tonnes, sending already-high prices on international markets even higher.
Molycorp has been working for several years to begin mining for rare earths once again, to help wean US manufacturers off Chinese imports. This year, they will reopen the Mountain Pass mine, an operation they've aptly named "Project Phoenix."
Getting to this point, however, has been expensive -- about $1 billion so far -- and has required a lot of special environmental permits. In July 2010, Molycorp went public on the NYSE with an Initial Public Offering of $394 million. In December 2010, they secured permits to start building a mining and manufacturing center so they could resume mining light rare earth elements such as neodymium and europium. The next month, they started mining bastnaesite ore. in October 2011, Molycorp announced that they discovered a heavy rare earth deposit near their Mountain Pass facility and received permission to drill two months later. The heavy rare earths terbium, yttrium, and dysprosium are necessary for manufacturing wind turbines and solar cells, so the government has a particular interest in finding sources of those elements within the US.
Japanese scientists produce artificial palladium: The new alloy has properties similar to the rare metal palladium. Part of the platinum group of metals, palladium should not to be confused with the rare earth minerals (also known as rare earth metals), a collection of seventeen elements in the periodic table, namely scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanides. Although the platinum group of metals are distinct from the rare earth metals, they are still hard to come by due to their global distribution and concentration.
The properties of palladium and other platinum group metals account for their widespread use in electronics, manufacturing, medicine, hydrogen purification, chemical applications and groundwater treatment. Although the new alloy will be difficult to produce commercially, Kitagawa intends to use the production method to develop other alloys for use as alternative rare metals.
It is time to reel China in if it is still possible: Beijing suspended ministerial-level meetings and, according to trading companies in Tokyo, blocked exports of rare earths, vital for high-tech manufacturing in Japan. The latest incident took place well within Japanese territorial waters. Last year's took place near the Senkaku Islands, which Japan controls but China claims and calls the Diaoyu Islands.
We have been discussing increased tensions due to ownership claims over long disputed islands and unrecovered raw material riches below the east and South China Seas for years. China is embroiled in territorial disputes with Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei Japan, and India:
China has been making all these ownership claims while warning other Asian countries to stay away. Meanwhile they have supposedly been building their world war machine with "innocent" intentions. China accuses Japan of exaggerating it as a military threat: It is no exaggeration it is called truth and you better be concerned and .China calls weapons modernization drive warnings alarmist "cock-and-bull story.
All this to no avail as China's answer is always that her intentions are innocent "yeah like Hitler's military buildup prior to WW2" and threatening the modern world with withholding rare earth elements needed to drive all our modern weapons and electronic.. China says it has largely shut down its rare earth industry for three months to address pollution problems. By invoking environmental concerns, China could potentially try to circumvent international trade rules that are supposed to prohibit export restrictions of vital materials. China has been imposing tariffs and quotas on its rare earth exports for several years, curtailing global supplies and forcing prices to rise eightfold to forty fold during that period for the various 17 rare earth elements.
China is worried about pollution like a hole in the head gut they better make the most of the game while they can because the world is going around their rare earth monopoly. Japanese researchers say they have discovered vast deposits of rare earth minerals, used in many hi-tech appliances, in the seabed. The geologists estimate that there are about a 100bn tons of the rare elements in the mud of the Pacific Ocean floor. At present, China produces 97% of the world's rare earth metals. Analysts say the Pacific discovery could challenge China's dominance, if recovering the minerals from the seabed proves commercially viable.
The United States is also in the race in an old proven uranium mine in Alaska. Alaska's Billion dollar mountain: Eight mining companies had held claims on Bokan Mountain before McKenzie came, and all had closed. They were looking for uranium, and most cleared out before they ever sold an ounce of ore. Theirs was poor luck and poor timing. Based on a resource assessment performed for McKenzie’s company Ucore by Aurora Geosciences, Bokan may contain mineral deposits worth $6.5 billion. That figure is not for uranium, though, but a group of elements called rare earths. Rare earths are crucial to modern and developing technologies but were little discussed until a temporary embargo in 2010 by China, which produces about 97 percent of the world’s supply, sparked a global prospecting frenzy.
We must all stop playing these games at this point and like it or not "share" if we are to survive into the future. Sadly we know the powers to be are not smart enough to do that. We are already in severe trouble with the condition of the world environmentally and due to power struggles getting ready to erupt in the Middle East and make things horrifically worse in many regards.
Being in a superior position puts one in a unique position of power and that power must be handled gracefully, with humility, responsibly, and not abused. That is something I taught all my sons and America under Bush did a lousy job of handling.
I am a little worried that China too is getting a little too heavy handed and abusive with her new position of power and beginning to take what she wants instead of being content with what she has which is what I constantly lecture has to be the case if we are to have a future. The time when man and the planet could handle war and colonialism is over, period or else!
We are Taiwan's, the Philippines, and Japan's protectors and now Vietnam's. Vietnam is no real threat to China so what is up here? As China flex's their military muscles in the area we are not supposed to worry. Just what are we supposed to think they are going to do with their advanced weaponry, missiles, stealth aircraft, aircraft carriers and the like.
Their threats are going to become more ominous until they cannot be ignored and it is too late. We have been here before. The world was not supposed to worry as Hitler built his arsenal and we know how that turned out. If peace is truly the goal then try something unique and share the wealth. We need peace to succeed as a world into the 21st century not more and never ending war.
James Joiner
Gardner, Ma
http://anaverageamericanpatriot.blogspot.com
