[ExI] not that rare earth (part 2 of at least 2)

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, 2 November, 2025 4:48 AM
To: spike at rainier66.com
Cc: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] not that rare earth (part 2 of at least 2)

 

On Sat, Nov 1, 2025 at 10:38 AM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

 

>> …I can't think of any application in which the rare earths don't need to be refined out into separate elements, if there is such an application it must not be a very important one… John K Clark

 

> If such applications exist, we wouldn’t know.  Those would be held as trade secrets. 

 

>…If there were such an application we already know magnetic or optical properties  can't be involved, because there is great variation in those properties among the different rare earths. So it must be something in their chemical properties because they are all almost identical in that respect…

 

On the contrary John.  The same properties that make those elements so difficult to separate makes them mostly interchangeable for magnetic purposes.  The companies that make those magnets don’t advertise that fact, for a reason: that is how they make their living.

 

>…But a trade secret that can be told in one short sentence such as "unrefined rare earths can be economically useful in the X chemical process" tend not to remain secret for very long…

 

It isn’t a secret.  Plenty of us have figured it out.  I already knew because of a project I was on nearly 30 years ago, where a company was using whatzisium (one of the obscure “rare” earths (an element that surprises you when you hear its name (because you have been around chemistry your adult life but never heard of this one (because it isn’t used for anything))) in an optical coating and claiming it was a proprietary process for which we needed to pay them a lot of money.  

 

This contractor had arbitrarily tried something in their optical coating proces, then tuned its focal plane array to the optical properties of that coating.  We paid.  But being a company with spectrum analyzers and electron microscopes, we looked at the product we bought from them and found out the materials that went into it, even if we don’t have the process itself.  Turns out any one of those lanthanides down there on the lower left will do what they were doing: it is a catalyst, acting as a big (well, tiny actually, big compared to other atoms) capacitor in a way: a tiny trace of it forms nuclei for crystal cell growth.  The element itself doesn’t participate in the reaction.  Probably the corresponding actinide would work even better, but it was radioactive.  The one above it would work too, but that one isn’t exotic and might already be patented.  John are you seeing a pattern here?  

> Recognizing all this, Musk found a way to phase out rare earth elements without losing significant performance in his magnets.

 

>…No Musk has not. It's true that back in 2008 the original Tesla had no rare earth magnets, in fact it had no permanent magnets of any sort because it used an old-fashioned AC induction motor. However the best efficiency you're going to get with one of those is about 85%, but a motor that uses rare earth permanent magnets has an efficiency of about 97%, and an induction motor is also larger and MUCH heavier than a rare earth motor of equal power…

 

Ja but notice what you are comparing to what.  There are magnets that use substitute materials for what any rare earth does.  But for Tesla it wouldn’t matter anyway, since EVs don’t use very much of it anyway.  They can get all that they need.

 

>… But Tesla is never going to be competitive with any Chinese car maker if they continue to go down that road….

 

The market cap for Tesla is 1.5 trillion bucks.  The Chinese are commies.  I don’t even know how to figure out the market cap of a company in China.  I wouldn’t invest in it.

 

>…In 2023 Tesla made a grand announcement they were going to find a way to make a great electric motor that didn't use any rare earths, but it's almost 2026 and we've heard nothing more about that, certainly nothing has been put in production…

 

How would you know?  They aren’t worried about the Chinese rare earth embargo.  That tells me they either have a fifty year stockpile or found a workaround.  I don’t see any performance degradation in the cars.

> we can go up the group one period if that element is cheaper and more easily available. 

 

>…I don't know what you mean by "go up the group one period" because the rare earth elements are all in the same group, and the periodic table of elements are arranged according to their chemical properties NOT their magnetic properties which is what we are interested in…

 

Ja, and this is where we had the sophistication to figure it out.  The lanthanides are not themselves magnetic.  They act as catalysts in crystal formation in the iron, which is magnetic.  We coulda figured this out along with the Tesla engineers.

 

>…The defining feature of the rare earth elements is that their outer valence electrons are all the same, and valence electrons are the ones that are primarily responsible for giving an element its chemical properties. But the various rare earth element's inner shell of electrons are all quite different, and that is what gives the specific element its magnetic properties….

 

John ponder what you just wrote, then recognize that the element itself isn’t magnetic.  The iron does that.  

 

> Elon wouldn’t risk the entire company on the continuing availability of anything on which China has a monopoly. 

 

>…If he wants to make electric cars then he'd have no choice, unless Musk could convince He Who Must Not Be Named to put a huge tariff on imported Chinese cars and thus force Americans to buy his overpriced outdated inefficient junk cars…

 

Nonsense.  Tesla found workarounds, for a good reason.  We have known since as far back as 2010 that manufacturing needs to be moved out of China.  Even if they need to use expensive domestic-produced rare earths (I don’t think they do) the little bit that EVs use would add so little cost, it wouldn’t matter compared to the cost of shipping Chinese cars over an ocean that spans damn near half the globe.

 

The cost competitiveness of Chinese cars comes from their cheap commie labor.  As technology advances, the cost of a manufactured item is influenced less and less by the cost of labor.  If you tour the Tesla factory, the first thing you notice is how few people are in that factory.  The cheap commie labor can’t compete with robots.

 

John look at what you are arguing: there is some magic material that the Chinese have, but we don’t because of our stringent environmental regulations, which lets them make electric cars cheaper, swoon how shall we cope?  I say nonsense.  We can already make more electric cars than the market wants, and the California government which mandated their sales is likely to be thrown out head first pretty soon because the market didn’t want that product they told us was so great, but the tax incentive expired, the carpool line access expired and the price of power nearly doubled in the past 8 years, making it so they aren’t really cheaper to operate anymore.  

 

So no, I am not buying that argument, or an EV, or Tesla stock, or Rivian stock, or any Chinese EV stock, not buying any of it.  I predict EVs will level out around almost half the new car sales eventually, which is good, because that could solve the energy storage problem: we allow EV owners to sell power back into the grid from their cars during peak demand.

> The US military wouldn’t base their technology on any material in which it didn’t hold a fifty year stockpile. 

 

>…If the US military was omnipotent I'm sure that's exactly what they would do.  

 

John K Clark

 

 

John, they did it.  The military has all the REEs they need.  They have enough of it to supply their own needs indefinitely.  Of course they thought of that: they aren’t going to depend for materials on the country we might be at war with soon.  Of course they stockpiled that stuff, not even knowing or caring what it might be used for.  Anticipating any threat is what the military does best.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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