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I see. I didn't realize "rare earth minerals" had a specific chemical definition
"Rare-earth" means lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. But scandium and yttrium are not used in magnets, so they would confuse people less by saying "lanthanide magnet" instead of "rare-earth magnet".
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And in English we use both Tungsten and Wolfram. The former is more popular, but the latter is still the basis of the element's symbol.
I don't know anyone who refers to the element as wolfram in English. The abbreviations are internationally standardized and many don't stand for the English words anyway (Latin is quite common, e.g. Pb means plumbum, for lead).
The value of many "rare earths" suddenly plummeted recently when an iron+nitrogen [edit: not "nickel"] alloy/crystallization ("allotrope") was discovered that approximates the properties of the best lanthanide magnets. ("Rare-earths" are not, incidentally, needed for [edit:batteries], wind turbines, or solar panels, however much certain people wish they were, or confidently claim.)
> "Rare-earths" are not, incidentally, needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines, or solar panels, however much certain people wish they were, or confidently claim. What exactly does this mean? EVs use a ton more rare earth minerals than conventional cars https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/minerals-used... Solar panels use silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium. Neodymium and dyspros…
the solar panels that used those cannot economically compete with silicon pv for utility-scale solar any more (perhaps that will change)
silicon is also not a rare earth element (and is not at all rare)
evs and wind turbines can use rare earth elements, it's true, but it's just a relatively minor engineering tradeoff not to use them
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"Rare-earth" means lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. But scandium and yttrium are not used in magnets, so they would confuse people less by saying "lanthanide magnet" instead of "rare-earth magnet".
There's actually 17 rare earth minerals. The Wikipedia page for it helpfully lists out common uses for each of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
in fact, almost all minerals contain trace amounts of rare-earth elements (and non-trace amounts are very rare)
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The graph you linked shows that this is not true. See the tiny purple graph at the right side of the bar? That's the rare earth minerals and their amount in an electric car is tiny.
Isn't 0.5kg per vehicle a lot for rare earth minerals?? Sure it looks tiny compared to the amount of copper, nickel, manganese, etc used, but the whole point is that they're rare... 0.5kg of neodymium is around $200 and it's probably the cheapest of the rare earths 0.5kg of europium is around $3,750 Obviously lots of variation there, but maybe ratio of how much it costs vs the total cost of all the other minerals is…
the reason the purified elements are expensive is that they're so hard to separate from each other
rare earth elements aren't actually rare
they're called that because we've inherited alchemical terminology from the 18th century when alchemists were first starting to discover that there were more than four elements, and that in particular there were several different kinds of earth, such as magnesia, silex, etc., and as it turns out things like thoria are in fact quite a bit rarer than silex
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> "Rare-earths" are not, incidentally, needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines, or solar panels, however much certain people wish they were, or confidently claim. What exactly does this mean? EVs use a ton more rare earth minerals than conventional cars https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/minerals-used... Solar panels use silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium. Neodymium and dyspros…
The graph you linked shows that this is not true. See the tiny purple graph at the right side of the bar? That's the rare earth minerals and their amount in an electric car is tiny.
The amount of magnesium in the human body is .1% by weight. That's not too far different from the amount of rare-earths in an EV.
In the case of a human, i would not wish magnesium deficiency on them, it is not fun, can have severe long-term consequences (such as death), and generally is something that medical professionals will find concerning.
In the case of an EV I don't know what the consequences of removing rare-earths would be, but the fact that it's a tiny percentage of total mass doesn't imply that they can just be dismissed.
Kiruna has a long history about mining incl world war II importance for iron. Also due execessive minig the whole town needed to be moved: “In 2004, it was decided that the present centre of the municipality would have to be relocated to counter mining-related subsidence.[29] The relocation would be made gradually over the coming decade. On January 8, 2007, a new location was proposed, northwest to the foot of the Lu…
I think it has happened several times actually. The town keeps moving as the mine expands.