About 50 years ago I was weeding a lettuce field at a muck farm in Oswego, N.Y. (there’s an Oswego in Kansas, too). Muck farms are rich in decayed organic material and hold water well, sometimes too well. When dry they can catch on fire, and unless a rain comes by quickly, the fires are very difficult to put out. However, these farms make growing vegetables easy.
One day while pulling up weeds, I discovered a very dense rock. One of the beauties of muck is the soil is generally rock free, making it easier to plant, weed and harvest. So this rock intrigued me. I took it to the place where I was staying and calculated that the “rock” was denser than iron. I then cut the “rock” with a hacksaw, revealing a shiny metal-like substance. I was sure it was a meteorite. The exterior looked like a piece of coal, and it had no rust.
This stay in Oswego was temporary as I was on my way to Kingston, Ontario by bicycle. I hid the “rock” at the farm and figured I would get it when I returned, which I did a week later after traveling a couple hundred miles sightseeing. As fate would have it, though, I could not find it when I returned. I later learned that it was indeed most likely a meteorite, a rare find. The internet was unavailable to me — you Gen-Xers, et al! — what a difference that would have made.
Rare earth minerals aren’t so rare, they just play hard to get. I so wish I could have found it.
That leads us to this month’s column: Some rare information on the so-labeled rare earth metals and their compounds. The truth is that these rare earth elements are not rare at all. What classified them as rare is that they are in lower concentrations and difficult to process; that is, to assemble the elements to make a magnet.
According to a recent article in Design World magazine:
“They are all relatively abundant in the earth’s crust but are ‘rare’ because they occur in relatively low concentrations compared with the ore for other metals. Metals like iron, gold, silver, copper and others can be found in high concentrations in ores. While rare earths don’t occur in ores like other metals, their overall availability is three times that of copper, two times that of zinc and 200 times more abundant than that of gold or platinum.”
Once the minerals are mined, they have to be separated from the chaff, so to say. Then these minerals must be combined with other minerals to create the desired magnet. That process is well beyond the scope of this column.
Rare earth minerals are not used in lithium ion batteries. However, they are used in the motors in EVs. Most motors we use daily do not have permanent magnets, but their use reduces the power consumption in electric motors like those in EVs. These permanent magnets are the issue.
The most widely used rare earth magnet material is the compound neodymium-iron-boron. According to Electronic Design: “At present 90% of the electric vehicles on the road are powered by permanent magnet synchronous motors. All PMSMs rely on significant amounts of so called rare earth minerals to make them compact, practical and powerful enough to compete with the internal combustion engines.”
China is the leader by a wide margin in rare earth minerals. In this tenuous world we live in, having too much of a dependency on anything allows the tail to wag the dog, as it were. So mining is opening up worldwide; right now Malaysia is gaining ground in mineral mining, including rare earths. The U.S. government under the leadership of President Biden also is recognizing the importance of these minerals not only for our commercial use but for the issue of national security. Therein lies the rub. Mining is toxic.
According to an article in Harvard Review about Rare Earth Element Mining:
“Here are two primary methods for REE mining, both of which release toxic chemicals into the environment. The first involves removing topsoil and creating a leaching pond where chemicals are added to the extracted earth to separate metals. This form of chemical erosion is common since the chemicals dissolve the rare earth, allowing it to be concentrated and then refined. However, leaching ponds, full of toxic chemicals, may leak into groundwater when not properly secured and can sometimes affect entire waterways.
“The second method involves drilling holes into the ground using polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, pipes and rubber hoses to pump chemicals into the earth, which also creates a leaching pond with similar problems. Additionally, PVC pipes are sometimes left in areas that are never cleaned up.
“Both methods produce mountains of toxic waste, with high risk of environmental and health hazards. For every ton of rare earth produced, the mining process yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic meters of waste gas, 75 cubic meters of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue. This stems from the fact that rare earth element ores have metals that, when mixed with leaching pond chemicals, contaminate air, water, and soil. Most worrying is that rare earth ores are often laced with radioactive thorium and uranium, which result in especially detrimental health effects. Overall, for every ton of rare earth, 2,000 tons of toxic waste are produced.”
For instance, on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea, villagers refused to sell their land for the giant Panguna copper mine. Instead, property negotiations were made according to Australian law and the government expropriated villagers’ land to the mining company Rio Tinto.
Villagers continued to protest the mining operation over land rights, pollution, and the lack of economic benefit for local people. The conflict escalated into a civil war in the 1990s, in which 15,000-20,000 people died. Rio Tinto was forced to close the mine, and in 2018 the Bougainville government imposed an indefinite moratorium on renewing the company’s license due to fears that violent civil conflict would erupt again, according to the International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 26 (2020).
I hope that the reader will see what is ahead. Key environmental and moral issues are at stake. Mining is a key operative in this day and age. The rush is on to not only “drill baby drill” but also to “dig baby dig.” I cited the moral issue with this one column to demonstrate how needs were justified for a period of time, which in turn denies basic human rights. Are there alternatives? The long — and short — answer is yes.
New electric motor designs are in the works that don’t rely on rare earths, including the “Cosmic Magnet” being worked on at Cambridge University. Tetrataenite, an iron-nickel alloy with a particular ordered atomic structure, is one of the most promising of those alternatives. Tetrataenite forms over millions of years as a meteorite, perhaps like the one I found, but now it can be made in a fraction of the time.
Hopefully the world will work together on this subject as it has three main issues — dependency, environmental, and moral. All are of equal importance!
Jim Bobreski of Penn Yan is a process control engineer in power production for 43 years. He also is the author of “Alternate Energy and Climate Change in the Age of Trump,” available at Longs’ Bookstore in Penn Yan and on Amazon.com.
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