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Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

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Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#5
post #3

million mt? Is that million megatons? And which rare earth elements are they?

See pages 14 and 15 of this presentation: https://mric.jogmec.go.jp/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/seminar...

It's mostly light rare earth elements. Over half of it is cerium and most of the rest is lanthanum. Most of the economic value is in the elements that are not cerium or lanthanum. It appears to have about the same proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (valuable light rare earth elements used in magnets) as the Mountain Pass, California mine, plus more terbium (more expensive heavy rare earth element also useful in magnets) than Mountain Pass.

Re: Turkey Discovers 694M Mt of Rare Earth Element Reserves

#7
post #3

million mt? Is that million megatons? And which rare earth elements are they?

Wouldn't it be 694 million metric tonnes? I million megatons is a hell of a lot.

Probably metric tonnes, but it's weird to use "Mt" to mean metric tonne rather than megatonne. The symbol for metric tonne is "t" [0]. It would certainly be less ambiguous to just spell it out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne

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