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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
15 of the 17 "rare-earth" elements are lanthanides. The remaining scandium and yttrium are not lanthanides.
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Quite impressive that little Sweden has found the second most elements in the world, 19 of them. https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/legac...
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It's a combination of historical industrial strategy, a culture with love of learning and individuals with a great love of learning who happened to be creative and innovative enough to discover these elements.
It's not like these elements are nowhere else. In fact, I don't think any yttrium, ytteribum, etc. is mined in Sweden at all.
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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…
> "point is that they're rare..." They are not, in fact, rare, as is almost always pointed out when they are mentioned.
Regardless, they never show up in a pure form in nature so what we should really be looking at is how common minerals that they're easy to extract from are not how common the atom itself is. And the useful rare-earth minerals are indeed "rare"
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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…
ferrocerium is the cheapest of the rare earths, but if we're talking about purified elements, cerium and yttrium are probably cheaper than neodymium 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 dis…
For the purposes of this conversation, which is about economics not geochemistry, they are in fact rare. At least the minerals are
"Rare" earth metals are actually not that rare. The reason we (in the west) don't mine much is that they are very dirty to refine. We don't want pools of toxic waste left over from refining all over the place but China etc will tolerate those. Given the ore itself is (ironically) quite common, all the mining happens where the refining happens because why would you bother shipping tonnes of ore there when is so common…
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs087-02/fs087-02.pdf
For all intents and purposes, they are in fact "rare"
Looks promising but still only a mineral resource as opposed to a mineral reserve. Which means it may not be economical to mine amongst other the things. Lot easier to publish/announce resources and most don’t go anywhere. (Been a mining/mech engineer for a while now)
The good part is that it is located in an area that is already planned for iron mining (with LOTS of existingt and past iron mining in the greater area), so the infrastructure needed is mostly there already.
It's an iron mine dating to pre-WWII so if they process the ore on site they're probably using either direct reduction or the newer electrolytic process. Neither of which have much in common with the liquid-liquid extraction process used for rare earth elements. It requires mixing the ore with an extractant (see D2EHPA or PC88A) into a nasty acidic slurry which is then separated into a aqueous layer containing the waste and a nonpolar solvent that strips the rare earth elements bound up with the extractant. All the different rare earth elements then have to be separated out of the nonpolar solvent.
The process resembles uranium mining far more than iron mining.
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But a Swedish speaking Finn and it seems he made his discoveries while living in Sweden. From wikipedia: "Johan Gadolin was born in Åbo (Finnish name Turku), Finland (then a part of Sweden)." [0] "In 1779 Gadolin moved to Uppsala University." Uppsala is in Sweden. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Gadolin
> Finland (then a part of Sweden) If Gadolin is Finnish, then, by the same logic, Immanuel Kant is Russian, because his birthplace, Koenigsberg, is a Russian exclave now.
The major iron ore deposits that are mined in the Kiruna area, Kirunavaara, Malmberget and so on are what are known as iron-oxide apatite deposits. These occur in other places in Sweden, including central Sweden, Grängesberg, Blötberget to name a couple, and in the world. They are rich in, well, iron, as well as the mineral apatite, which containes abundant phosphorus. Phosphate minerals like apatite have a habit of acting as sort of a vacuum for REEs, enriching them in thes iron ores. These deposits also contain other REE minerals, xenotime, monazite, allanite.
Now why do I suggest that this is greenwashing? Well REEs are a hot topic right now due to being metals that are critical in transitioning to green technology, as well as other high tech uses. The currently mined iron oxide apatite mines up right next door to this new ore body also are rich in REE. Not as rich, but they come out to be about 0.07 percent on average in these ores, but the sheer volume of ore means that the potential tonnage is high. But they aren't hailed in the media as a harbinger of European REE independance.
Now, apatite and its phosphorus is not wanted in iron, so when the iron ore is crushed and enriched on site, it produces a waste sand known as tailings, which are then dumped in ponds near to the mine. The tailings are enriched in the apatite and other REE rich minerals, as the iron has been taken out.
Just the tailings pond in Kiruna, which amount to 76 million tonnes of tailings (as of 2019) have been measured to contain 0.12% REE. Pretty close to what is reported from this new deposit. Combined with other tailings repositories in the area, it is potentially hundreds of thousands of tonnes of REE just sitting there, ready to go more or less, already mined and crushed. They could easily be exploiting that resource if they were serious about REE production. To be fair, there are projects working on it, but it is still small scale pilot projects.
But they don't get splashy international headlines because like I said, I doubt this is really about them hot to mine REE. It is because they want to get at the easy to extract, easy to process iron fast, so the Swedish government makes a big announcement, to sell this as an REE deposit and try and get mining it faster, and wrapping it up in a big green bow to try and make the environmentalists and the Sami keep quiet.
Fun to see Kiruna here on Hacker News! My wife and I lived there for a year in 2014/2015. The mine is the _reason_ for the town, and it's exciting for my friends that live there to see additional minerals other than the high-quality iron ore they currently are mining. As some other comments have mentioned, the town is being moved as the mine follows the iron ore under the current town. It's a relatively small town (~…
Just so no-one gets the wrong idea: there was an additional 0 accidentally added there, the real number is ~22,000.