Japanese Recycling Weakens China’s Rare Earth Stranglehold

[gremlin]

this is a good read. and mite start opening mining in new areas. any one want to mine a land fill.

http://oilprice.com/Metals/Commodities/ ... ehold.html

As Deng Tsiao-Ping observed before his death, rare earth metals - which are crucial to producing all manner of "clean" high-technology - are China's oil.

Despite the name, rare earth metals aren't that "rare" - they are just found scattered throughout ores that make them hard - and expensive - to secure.

While other nations have been looking with feverish intensity in the last couple of years at least for these precious metals, including a so-far stalled attempt by Molycorp to re-open a mine in California's high desert, near Nevada, that had been closed a decade or so ago because it was too expensive - China has been the source of a constantly quoted figure of some 93% of the global supply, which is used in high-definition televisions, cell phones, computers, guided missiles, hybrid cars, satellites, wind turbines, batteries, magnets, and clean energy applications, like generators for large wind turbines and lightweight electric motors for cars - all product areas in which China has systematically set about making itself THE world leader.

At the moment, however, it is not surprising to discover that the largest importer of these metals is China's neighbor Japan - with whom, of course, it has been engaged in - to our mind - a bizarre and nasty confrontation during these last few weeks, about an incident that occurred in the middle of nowhere in the East China Sea and was, to quote the inimitable George Constanza, "about nothing", at least as far as we could tell.

One aspect of this strange encounter was the sudden - and bizarrely unannounced - stoppage of rare earth exports from China to Japan, which was neither particularly nice in itself nor easy to understand, given the Chinese reluctance to actually say they were doing this.

But one thing it DID do - since both Japanese and Western media made no secret of the Chinese "boycott" of rare-earth-metal exports to Japan - was make many people in the world aware of those metals, and their key role in emerging, green high-technologies. It is thus doubly ironic that the first real dent in what some have called China's monopoly in these key substances appears to have come from, of all places, Japan.

[Hoser John]

We have PLENTY of mineable deposits BUT the *&^%$# environutz just litigate the projects to death--I'ts not availabilty,technology, need ,want, or desire--just them DAMN LAWYERS with pockets fulla casino/fishermen/environutz cash--we need a 1776 in 2010---John

[gremlin]

one would think its planed. set up high tech eletronics then pull the price on the stuff to make them.

could be why china is setting up shop in indiana on making electric cars. to sell there goods.