Rare earths are actually neither rare nor earths. Most of them are quite abundant, but they are almost never found in their pure form. Instead, they come dissipated in very low concentrations within other minerals, like grains of pepper in a meatball. That makes them difficult and expensive to separate out. Many of the rare earth metals are often found clustered together. The seventeen rare earths, in atomic-number order, are scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium, and lutetium. Rare earths are like vitamins, or spices, or yeast, or LSD: They are used in tiny amounts but have major effects. Each is unique, but, in general, they have unusual magnetic and electrical properties that can confer additional powers to other materials with which they are alloyed. “They enable both the hardware and the software of contemporary life to be lighter, faster, stronger, and longer ranging,” writes Julie Michelle Klinger in Rare Earth Frontiers. “Global finance, the Internet, satellite surveillance, oil transport, jet engines, televisions, GPS, and emergency rooms could not function without rare earth elements.”
The ill-fitting name dates back to the eighteenth century, when a Swedish artillery officer and amateur chemist found a very unusual rock in the village of of Ytterby, near Stockholm. A Finnish chemist named Johan Gadolin analyzed it and declared it a new type of “earth.” Over time, scientists separated out the several elements in the rock. If their names sound made up, that’s because they are. Yttrium was named after the village, gadolinium after Gadolin, scandium after Scandinavia. (Cut those chemists some slack. All the easy names, like gold and tin, were already taken.)
These new elements remained little more than curiosities for the next century or so, little-visited cubicles on the periodic table. Then, in the late 1800s, a German chemist figured out how to use one of them, cerium, to create the gas mantle—a fabric bag that lights up when heated. Billions of these mantles would eventually be used as streetlights. That was great for Germans who enjoyed an evening stroll but awful for people in the distant countries where the rare earths were mined. In those places, acidic water from the mines leached into local water supplies. “At the time, these costs were hidden to Western consumers, because they were happening in faraway places like Brazil, India, and South Africa,” Lisa Berry Drago explained on the podcast Distillations.
By the second half of the twentieth century, America became the world’s top producer of these curious metals thanks to a single mine. In 1949, prospectors in the high-desert scrublands of eastern California, while looking for uranium to build up America’s nuclear arsenal, stumbled across a huge deposit of bastnaesite, an ore containing fifteen of the seventeen rare earths. They were disappointed to learn that the radiation they had detected came not from uranium but from thorium, a radioactive element that is often found with rare earths. The Molybdenum Corporation of America purchased the mining claims at the site, dubbed Mountain Pass, and quickly developed a lucrative business selling europium, a rare earth that enhances the ability of glass screens to display colors. There was a booming demand for europium from makers of the hottest new high-tech product of the day: color television. Scientists quickly found new uses for the neodymium, praseodymium, and other rare earths in the ore, especially in the growing consumer electronics industry.
Excerpted from Chp 2 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.