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WHAT ARE RARE EARTH ELEMENTS?

These elements perplex us in our searches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us—mocking, mystifying, and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities.
—Sir William Crookes (February 16, 1887)
Rare earths: neither rare, nor earths.
—BBC World Service (March 23, 2014)
“In a way,” writes Abraham (2011), “it begins with semantic confusion” (101). Rare earths are not rare; the name says more about their scientific beginnings than their actual qualities. In 1788 a miner in Ytterby, Sweden, found a strange black rock that was identified in 1794 as a new kind of “earth”: an archaic term for acid-soluble elements1 (Rowlatt 2014). Because it had not been found anywhere else, it was presumed to be scarce. Hence the name, rare earths. The implication of rarity mobilizes all sorts of sentiments that have legitimated the ruthless pursuit and capture of these elements over the past century, and perhaps that is why it persists over 125 years after this misnomer was identified among specialist audiences.2 As illustrated in each of the cases examined in subsequent chapters, this misnomer continues to operate in territorial contests and geopolitical maneuvering. Tremendous sums of capital are mobilized and the sacrifice of certain landscapes and lives is imposed across global space, all in the name of rare earths.
The dark rock unearthed in 1788 was named “gadolinite” after its discoverer Johan Gadolin; it was later found to be a mineral consisting of cerium, lanthanum, yttrium, and iron. When Dmitri Mendeleev, Julius Meyer, and other chemists inspired by the 1860 Karlsruhe conference put together their respective drafts of the periodic table, there was no place for most of the lanthanides, which are the fifteen elements from lanthanum (atomic number fifty-seven) to lutetium (number seventy-one) (Mendelejew 1869; Scerri 2007; Spedding 1961). Yet at the time, a few of the known elements (lanthanum, cerium, terbium, and erbium) suggested the presence of a rare earth family, what would come to be known as the lanthanide series, that “distant island to the south” of the rest of the periodic table (Atkins 1995).
The elements that are included with the lanthanide series in references to rare earths change over time (see figure 4). During the race to build the nuclear bomb, thorium and uranium were referred to as rare earth elements because of their chemical affiliation and frequent geological coincidence. For the same reason, scandium and yttrium are currently counted as rare earths, although they are found elsewhere on the periodic table: twenty-one and thirty-nine, respectively. Niobium, principally mined in Brazil, and tantalum, one of the notorious conflict minerals mined in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, are often grouped with rare earth elements in political and popular discourse. Despite their geological coincidence and similar ductile properties, neither is currently considered a rare earth element beyond occasional instances of political or marketing opportunism. Therefore, at present rare earths refers to a group of seventeen chemically similar elements sharing certain exceptional magnetic and conductive properties (Beaudry and Gschneidner 1974; Goldschmidt 1978; Liu 1978). The rare earth group comprises about seventeen percent of all naturally occurring elements (Cardarelli 2008).3
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FIGURE 4A. The term “rare earths” refers primarily to the lanthanide series, as depicted by the International Union of Applied and Pure Chemistry.
Source: Image by Molly Roy.
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FIGURE 4B. This is a version of the periodic table presented by a mining company with lithium, tungsten, and uranium projects contending to break into the rare earth market in North America. Note the inclusion of “other” elements under the “rare” label. This table labels what are broadly referred to as “technology metals” as “rare.” Many contemporary commentators have adopted this practice in order to advance the incorrect thesis that these elements are actually scarce.
Source: Image by Molly Roy.
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FIGURE 4C. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) uses a version of this table. It differs from the table used by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) by excluding scandium. The DOE, among many others, includes scandium.
Source: Image by Molly Roy.
Although most rare earths are relatively abundant (see table 1 and table 2), they are dispersed throughout Earth’s crust, threaded through iron, phosphate, or copper-gold deposits. They are also found in placer and residual deposits formed by the long-term erosion of igneous rocks, which explains why they show up on the black sand beaches of Brazil, India, and elsewhere.
Some rare earths, such as promethium, are not found on Earth outside of nuclear reactors, but are used to produce batteries that power pacemakers and space crafts, as well as to manufacture luminescent paint for watch dials (Krebs 2006). Others, such as thulium, are so scarce that only a few kilograms can be extracted from 500 tonnes of rare earth rich ores (Emsley 2001). Thulium is essential to the production of surgical lasers used to treat neurological and prostate conditions (Duarte 2010) and because it shines blue under ultraviolet light, it is stamped onto Euro banknotes as an anti-counterfeiting measure (Wardle 2009). Then there is scandium, which is so difficult to separate from other rare earths and uranium that annual global trade in the pure metal has yet to exceed 100 kilograms. Scandium is used in the metal halide lamps that illuminate streets, stadiums, and film studios (Krebs 2006) and is part of the secret recipe for high-performance handguns, bicycle frames, and baseball bats (Bjerklie 2006; Wesson 2014; Staff 2009).
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Other rare earth elements are not as scarce but their uses are comparably wide-ranging. Because of their exceptional magnetic and conductive properties, this family of soft, ductile metals is essential for a diverse and expanding array of high-technology applications fundamental to globalized modernity as we know it. Global finance, the Internet, satellite surveillance, oil transport, jet engines, televisions, GPS, and emergency rooms could not function without rare earth elements. They are necessary to produce the navigation components of the most advanced remote warfare technologies, such as drones and smart bombs (Hedrick 2004; Kidman et al. 2012). They are critical components of green technologies, such as wind turbines, solar panels, and hybrid fuel-cell batteries (Armand and Tarascon 2008; Hashimoto et al. 2009; Humphries 2013; Jones 2013). They are essential in the development of nanotechnologies and are used in the production of consumer electronics such as smartphones, hard drives, and flat screen monitors (Krishnamurthy and Gupta 2005).
So thoroughly embedded are rare earths that an analysis of their role in modern life precludes a straightforward commodity-chain or sector-specific analysis, unless, for example, one looks exclusively at a certain kind of magnet (Zepf 2013). There is no singular “rare earth market” to speak of, but rather multiple markets for the seventeen elements (and combinations thereof) with widely divergent availabilities and applications. The production process of a single rare earth resembles a web more than a chain because it graces such an array of goods with its properties. For example, erbium, which turns pink when oxidized, lends its hue to rose-colored glass and porcelain tableware (Hammond 2000) while also acting as an amplifier in fiber optic cables, enabling the construction of global Internet communications networks (Becker, Olsson, and Simpson 1999). This gives rare earths an air of ineffability—they are seemingly everywhere, but in such minute quantities or such sophisticated applications that they are difficult to quantify. This amplifies the effects of supply crises.
The nature of their applications, like their geological occurrence, is both ubiquitous and dispersed. They are most commonly used in alloys, mixed with other elements such as iron or nickel to make them better, stronger, faster, and lighter. Scientific parlance refers to the process of adding rare earths to other elements as “doping,” borrowing the slang describing the use of performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports (Digonnet 2001). In China they are called the “MSG of industry” (Klinger 2011) to capture the sense that, much like how a pinch of MSG enhances one’s cooking, just a little bit of rare earth enhances the quality of industrial output. Similarly, German industry refers to them as “spice” metals (Zepf 2013) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) describes them as “vitamins,” which, when added to other elements produce results that neither could achieve alone (Koerth-Baker 2012). In Japan, they are described using the following metaphor: “oil is the blood, steel is the body, and rare earths are the vitamins of a modern economy” (Dent 2012). These metaphors convey a sense of the relatively small quantities generally required to achieve desired effects: most consumer electronics, for example, are composed of only a tiny portion of rare earths. Their dispersal, the difficulties involved in isolating individual elements, and the fact that a few rare earths are actually uncommon excites political economic passions around their scarcity. These passions, somewhat paradoxically, have been most prominent in places where rare earths are plentiful, as in China, Brazil, and the United States.
Although rare earths are now essential to the technological infrastructure of modern life as we know it, for nearly a century after their discovery there was little use for them. During that first long century spanning from 1788 to 1891, scientific progress with rare earth elements was limited: “A great many learned men with famous names busied themselves with rare earth elements and reported interesting work 
 nevertheless, no applications or industrial usage came out of these efforts” (Greinacher 1981, 4). The first successful application addressed a long-standing problem in newly urbanized industrial zones before the advent of urban electricity: how to produce light cheaply and reliably over a large area. This imperative was driven by the industrialist desire to maintain production after dark, especially during long winter nights in northern Europe (Bogard 2013; Ekirch 2005; Koslofsky 2011).
Carl Auer von Welsbach’s invention of gas mantles (Eliseeva and BĂŒnzli 2011; Welsbach 1889) at the end of the nineteenth century inaugurated the first phase of industrial usage4 of mixed or simply separated rare earth elements. Although the gas mantle lantern contained only 1 percent of the rare earth element cerium,5 the production scale was massive: by the 1930s, over five billion had been sold (Niinistö 1987), providing networks of city lights before the widespread establishment of electrical grids. Welsbach’s first invention presaged the second, which addressed a key problem with gas mantles: they were difficult to ignite, and piles of rare earth wastes left over from the production of the incandescent mantles were prone to combustion. By blending these rare earth wastes with 30 percent iron, Welsbach developed the alloy “mischmetall” that sparked when struck. He patented this as the “flint stone,” which is still used in all manner of ignition switches, from lanterns to cigarette lighters to automobiles (Krishnamurthy and Gupta 2005).
These initial technological and commercial innovations sparked tremendous interest in the broader applications of rare earths. But it was not until the atomic, television, and computer age that uses beyond the most basic applications would be found for them. Still, the gas mantle and the flint stone were so successful that their invention expanded the rare earth industry dramatically and drove the quest for raw materials to Europe’s (post)colonial frontiers in the Americas, India, and China. Until 1895, gadolinite and bastnĂ€site from Sweden furnished most of the raw materials for rare earth elements and thorium (Greinacher 1981). In 1887, a British mining interest began extracting rare earths from the monazite sands on the beaches of North and South Carolina; the operations were soon taken over by the Welsbach Light Company of New York (Levy 1915).
The German Thorium Syndicate and the Austrian Welsbach Company began exploiting monazite placers in Brazil in 1905 and in India in 1909, which drove US production out of business by 1910, except for a brief interlude during World War I (Mertie 1953). Brazil and India then supplied the global market—consisting of Europe and North America (Russia was self-sufficient)—until 1948. The Indian Atomic Energy Act of 1948 prohibited the export of monazite because radioactive thorium, abundant in the sands, was named a source of atomic energy and therefore a strategic mineral for domestic use only (McMahon 1994). This abrupt interruption in supplies to the United States had a temporary chilling effect on research and industry6 until domestic production expanded again in late 1952 (Congress 1952).
Part of the lag in identifying applications had to do with early experiments, which generated mistaken perceptions of rare earths, what they are, and how they behave. Frank Spedding, director of the Institute for Atomic Research at Ames Laboratory, wrote:
Even as late as the early part of this century, one could find statements in textbooks that that the rare earths were all very much alike and resembled lanthanum. As we all know now, this is far from the truth. The differences in the properties of these elements are as great as the differences between the members of other series in the periodic table, such as sodium, potassium, rubidium and cesium, or copper, silver, and gold. The melting points of the rare earth metals vary from around 800 to 1650 degrees Celsius. The vapor pressures of the metals at a given temperature differ by a factor of more than a million from the most volatile member to the least volatile member. Some of the metals are magnetic, others are not. Lanthanum is a super-conductor. Some, such as lanthanum and cerium, corrode readily in air, while others corrode inappreciably at room temperatures. (1961, 2)
Through most of the twentieth century rare earths were still treated as rare and research interest was confined to highly specialized audiences, such as readers of Journal of the Less Common Metals, inaugurated in 1959. Although small, this journal drew contributions from materials scientists, chemists, and physicists experimenting with alloys and compounds during a time of tremendous expansion in communications, military, and aerospace industries. The mid-twentieth century seemed to be a golden era for experimentation, as there was rising interest in the usefulness of rare earth elements along with political and economic imperatives to exploit potential applications. Yet many basic characteristics of rare earths still remained unexplored. An excerpt from an article published in 1961 conveys a sense of the times, in which laboratories occasionally caught fire as scientists figured out which elements could and could not be mixed: “Attempts to make alloys of thorium and ytterbium by arc-melting were unsuccessful; the two metals appear to be virtually immiscible even at the melting point of thorium. At this temperature the volatility of ytterbium is serious, resulting in heavy losses of the metal which, when deposited in the form of a thin film on the inside of equipment...