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

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
>… But from an economic and political viewpoint it really doesn't matter WHY rare earth elements are needed to make the best magnets, the important fact is that they DO matter…

 

We were told it would take several years to bring domestic REE production up to the demand and the ecological impact would be great.  Yesterday we were told the Mountain Pass facility had its environmental permits in place and would be producing all we need in two years.  I am confident we can go two years on stockpiles.

 

But you hit on the truth: the Chinese REE embargo may have led to exaggerated reporting of threats by those who think it is a big security threat to be behind China in the wind race.  I don’t see it.  China has all that wide open windy useless land.  We have some of that too, but we saw what happens when local grids rely too much on wind power: the huge cold front on 7-8 December 2017 caused shortages in availability in Texas.  Blackouts caused people to die, for Texas doesn’t need a lot of heating most of the time, but that time it did.

 

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-final-death-toll-246/

 

The power company in California told us all about this: when wind and solar are added to the grid  (particularly wind power because it is harder to predict in most places) the baseline generation capacity must be retained.  Otherwise the reliability specs cannot be met, and the occasional oddball conditions, such as the 2017 cold front in southern Texas can correspond with no wind power and high demand, resulting in blackouts and hypothermia fatalities.

 

Power generation capacity must be paid for, even when the wind is blowing and the local natural gas facility is idle.  This is costly.  The bad old capitalist power company was telling the truth, our politicians were lying (or more likely just didn’t understand the nature of the problem they were introducing.)  Power prices doubled since 2017.  Keith you and I never noticed our power bills back then.  We do now.

 

Power generation and distribution is a wildly complicated field of engineering, waaaaay damn harder to understand than the iconic symbol of complication, rocket science.  Hell rocket science is fun and easy, once on masters a few disparate fields of study.  Power distribution seems simple enough in theory, but it boggles the mind in actual practice.  With voter mandated “renewable” power, it gets way harder to master.  However… there is a bright side: it makes for lots of great investment opportunities for those who grok it well enough to bet on it.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

> We can make good magnets without the rare earths.

 

Perhaps there is a way to make intensely powerful magnets without using such exotic elements, but if there is search a way nobody has found it yet, if somebody had it would be a trillion dollar Nobel prize deserving discovery and you and I and the entire world would certainly know about it.  

 

 > How about lutetium?  That one isn’t even radioactive, but if you saw the chemical symbol Lu, you would guess someone is putting you on.  But there it is, right there between ytterbium and Hafnium.  Chemistry hipsters, how many of you have ever worked with lutetium?  Neither have I.

 

What's your point? Some people have specialized in the rare earth elements during their entire scientific career, and I'm sure for some of them their PhD was a study of how lutetium behaves under various conditions. Incidentally lutetium is one of the rarest of the rare earths but even so it's much more common than silver, and that fact tells you that the important thing is not rare earth mines, it's rare earth refineries.

 

> But for the application where a lot of the material is used (generators and turbines) the density doesn’t matter anyway. 

 

Density doesn't matter but weight does matter in wind turbines and cars and aircraft and drones and robots. Just one F-35 fighter jet contains about 900 pounds of rare earth metals, and an ultra modern Virginia-class attack submarine needs 9,200 pounds. Even the phone in your pocket would be larger and heavier than it is now without rare earth metals.  
 

> China’s motors are not better enough to cover the cost of shipping them here.

 

That's not true, or rather it wasn't true until He Who Must Not Be Named astronomically huge and completely idiotic tariffs came along. 

> your confidence appears to be unjustifiable arrogance. 

 

I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but you keep making statements that scientifically are objectively false, and that can be frustrating.  

 

The only industry I can see which is seriously impacted is one we don’t really need: wind turbine manufacturers. 

 

China certainly believes that they need wind turbines because they're building them for their own use at a furious rate, and that rate is increasing. Today China generates 490 gigawatts of electricity from wind power, and they plan to produce 1300 gigawatts by 2030. A typical nuclear power plant produces about 1 gigawatt. You Know Who hates wind power because he believes "the windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously", but I assume that is not the reason you dislike it, please correct me if I'm wrong. 

 

John K Clark

 

 

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