35 ms·

China plans to ban exports of rare earth magnet tech

342 points by moose_man 4y ago

insane_dreamer 4y ago
China long-term strategizes while the US often twiddles its thumbs and belatedly responds (it's waking up with the export controls on chip manufacturing tech, but it should have done that a decade ago).
- dmix 4y ago
  Why should the US instigate trade wars so hard? Why not be pro-free trade as possible (even if it's imbalanced) while investing heavily in their own self-reliance. That sounds more win-win to me than throwing gasoline on the fire when there's little practical self-realiance replacements in the near term without bigger consequences than the alternative. It's a dangerous game to play without substantial and subsequent investment domestically and among closer partner countries in stuff like manufacturing and mining - ahead of time. Pure competition instead of using bully tactics while only reacting appropriately when the gambles don't play out.
  - ddoolin 4y ago
    IMO it's because shifting towards self-reliance usually means shifting investment away from international investment and implementing protectionist regulations which are seen as economically hostile towards other states. So perhaps just the act of shifting towards domestic investment and protection will be taken as instigation. I agree with you, though, and I think the "icing on the cake" instigations are in large part political maneuvers.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    > should the US instigate trade wars so hard I'm not suggesting instigation; China has been playing hardball for a long time now. > without substantial and subsequent investment domestically and among closer partner countries in stuff like manufacturing and mining this is what China is willing to do but the U.S. isn't (until very recently), which has put the U.S. at a huge disadvantage
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    China had (and still has) higher tariffs on U.S. goods decades ago. They don’t respect copyright laws, use tech for spying, and steal technology. How is the US starting a trade war?
    - dmix 4y ago
      I didn't say they started it. I explicitly said at a known imbalance. Because without significant preperation you just make it worse where both sides lose. Expecting China to not steal and cheat when it's a core part of their modern culture is a losing game. Expecting some demographic way-too-used to being poor via gov policy, a long history of alleged victimization by the US being the root cause of ALL their problems sold by propaganda for 50yrs+, and totally obedient to a hyper central government built on top of reality denial (aka "saving face"). ...idk I feel like the only real alternative is investment into self reliance and getting whatever concessions you can via positive trade actions until then. It's like fighting piracy with copyright laws when everyone pirates movies and Netflix doesn't exist and you have to go to Blockbuster. And allegedly if we do ban piracy we'll eventually get downloadable movies in an indefinite amount of time because our gov will suddenly care and save us.
- thrashh 4y ago
  A little over 10 years ago, Xi Jinping came into power. The ship massively changed direction with Xi. He literally made his own term limit forever 5 years ago. China 10 years before is way different.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  China thinks in medium term but it gets confused for long term. Authoritarianism is inherently unstable. It looks like long term until you realize their government cannot reliably transition power. Even with recent measures against China, the U.S. is far more open to China than China is to the U.S.
moose_man 4y ago
"China is estimated to hold an about 84% share of the global market in neodymium magnets and an over 90% interest in samarium cobalt magnets. Japan, meanwhile, has about 15% of the neodymium magnet market and a less-than-10% share of that for samarium cobalt. If China bans the export of such technologies, it would be difficult for the United States and Europe, which do not traditionally manufacture rare earth magnets, to newly enter the market, thus making those countries totally dependent on China, according to a European source. Beijing has been investing in facilities to manufacture magnets at low cost through large-scale production, which could lead to Japan losing its market share in the future. The draft revision says the export ban and restrictions are aimed at protecting “national security” and are in the “public interest of society.” Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration has positioned magnets as a key factor in China’s economic growth and security." This is not normal decoupling, we're in a full on economic war.
- verdverm 4y ago
  We've been in Cold War 2 for a while. It's hard to see the other two options as better alternatives. (hot war & capitulation) The West learned a lot during the first cold war and will outlast. Authoritarianism has a problem with corruption and not telling the leader the truth of reality.
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    Time will tell. We live interesting times.
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Sadly, the West is looking more and more authoritarian though.
    - augment001 4y ago
      Unfortunately so, but by comparison to China it has a very long way to go.
hunglee2 4y ago
is this an attempt to suppress the innovation rate of other countries?
- edgyquant 4y ago
  It’s likely them firing back due to US tightening chip exports.
  - TomK32 4y ago
    This is really the best they could come up with?
  - cm2012 4y ago
    I think its for the best to find new rare earth sources outside of China now anyway, before any great power struggles.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - samus 4y ago
      There are lots of sources; it's just very environmentally damaging and/or expensive to extract them. And so far China could, for various reasons, do it way more cheaply than most others. Seems this is going to change...
  - wlesieutre 4y ago
    Or the battery minerals/components rules for EV tax credits
- PKop 4y ago
  It's about avoiding counter-party risk and strengthening domestic supply chains against uncertain economic, geopolitical and military future. Certainly there is the element of "don't strengthen your adversaries" too. Why would they want to make the West stronger (if they can avoid it) if the West is a potential military threat?
jmclnx 4y ago
I read "Rare Earths" are nor really rare. But the article did say extracting these elements cheaply causes a lot of environmental damage, which as we know, China is perfectly fine with. I also read the US is close to opening a "mining" site for Rear Earths, but not sure where or for what elements.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  They are rare in the sense that they tend to be extremely diffuse, rather than having nice, massive veins of concentrated ore or elemental metal like you might find for copper or bauxite. Since they tend to be diffuse, mining them requires disrupting significant volumes of earth and rock, plus the chemicals needed to separate them out of the less interesting material that gets dug up. The cheapest way to do that is to strip mine large tracts of land and not reclaim or treat any water used in the process, which will likely be full of heavy metals and other chemicals. If we don't like how other countries do it, we have to be willing to do it ourselves, which means years delayed supply chains (basically every mine in the US is protested and delayed through the legal system) and higher prices for the refined materials (it costs more to do it right).
  - akiselev 4y ago
    It's called "liquid-liquid extraction" [1] and requires crushing the rock and mixing it with an extractant (see D2EHPA [2] which is also used in uranium extraction) into a nasty acidic slurry. It 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 using even more toxic chemicals, each of which leaves behind a different hazardous waste. Fun(?) fact: This process looks a lot like the alkali extraction process used to make cocaine, DMT, and a variety of other drugs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extracti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric_ac...
    - 4y ago
dirtyid 4y ago
Export controls on manufacturing tech not materials, which I don't imagine is particularly enforcable. Will just get transhipped through middlemen, but I can imagine increasing price astronomically for competitive advantage.
petilon 4y ago
Relevant: Huge rare earth metals discovery in Arctic Sweden https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64253708 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64253708 But it will take 10 to 15 years to process it.
- stainablesteel 4y ago
  > Well, we're not exactly sure what elements they have found yet. What they have said is that they've - they will be producing at least two elements. One is called neodymium, and the other is called praseodymium still missing a lot of them unfortunately, the rest are only found within chinese territory i had last heard of the us military trying to target specific parts of the asteroid belt to make up for their lack of natural resources in this regard, and given their recent feats over the last few years with asteroids i have high hopes for that
nortonham 4y ago
well now that they basically manufacture everything we're fucked unless we--at the very least--try to get along with china
agentultra 4y ago
Aren't the materials to make rare-earth magnets... not actually that rare? It's only rare in the sense of their dispersal in the earth's crust, this making it a rather dirty and ecologically disruptive activity sourcing them. The US could theoretically start producing rare-earth metals, couldn't they?
- halJordan 4y ago
  Yes, but it trivializes the issue. You might ask why colonies needed to import finished goods from the motherland when they had all this wood and iron available.
  - arroz 4y ago
    This is not the same thing Colonies many times weren’t even allowed to produce manufactured goods There might be some learning curve but the extraction of rare earth materials should be well documented, it used to be done in the US I don’t know about the manufacturing of goods from the extracted elements though.
waterheater 4y ago
That's okay. The US has polymagnets, which are a paradigm shift in magnetics. https://www.polymagnet.com/ https://www.polymagnet.com/
- nyokodo 4y ago
  That's super cool. But these have been around for years, has the paradigm really shifted so as to totally replace all Chinese magnet manufacturing?
- scythe 4y ago
  In the interest of keeping the recent magnetic materials breakthroughs in one subthread, here's the paper I've been excited about for months: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204315 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204... "Direct formation of hard magnetic tetrataenite in bulk alloy castings" It has long been known that iron-nickel and iron-cobalt alloys form a stable tetragonal phase, the L1_0, at standard conditions, which is a hard magnetic material with a high magnetic energy product comparable to the best rare-earth magnets. In fact, L1_0 FeCo is predicted to be the best magnet of any material that has been modeled. But these phases are not stable at high temperatures, and the relaxation time to form them at normal temperatures is expected to be on the order of millions of years. L1_0 FeNi has been found in meteorites, but these are extremely rare, and the damage caused by impact limits the usefulness of the material. In the recent work by Ivanov et al, L1_0 iron-nickel alloy was successfully prepared at macroscale by precipitation from a melt containing large proportions (on the order of 10%) of phosphorus and carbon. This is the first time that bulk L1_0 FeNi has been produced on Earth's surface. This potentially opens the door to producing strong magnets from just iron and nickel. For a sense of scale, annual nickel production is about two million tonnes per year, while neodymium production is less than ten thousand tonnes per year, with neodymium representing a fraction of that. The material availability for producing strong magnets therefore jumps by more than an order of magnitude.
- beambot 4y ago
  IIRC, Polymagnets give unique field patterns but do not replicate the overall field strength of neodymium magnets. A much better alternative is someone like Niron Magnetics, who build nitrogen-doped iron magnets that demonstrate field strengths that are (roughly) equivalent to rare-earths: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359383
Animats 4y ago
I'm trying to find out if the rare earth extraction plant that MP Minerals was building in Alliance, TX actually got built.[1] Google and Bing pictures are from 2021 and show a vacant lot. If anyone is near there, please go to the corner of Independence and Victory and see how the construction is going. PR: "MP Materials broke ground for its magnet factory at Alliance last April, and completed the building’s shell in September. ... The company plans to start delivering alloy from the Fort Worth plant to General Motors late this year, and magnets in 2025, MP Materials founder James Litinsky said in an annual profit report meeting." MP Minerals already has the largest rare earth mine in the US, at Mountain Pass, CA. That went bankrupt in 2015 because of low-priced competition from China. They finally got a process working that didn't cause major pollution problems. That mine has been back in action since 2018. They only do initial separation at the mine; the ore is shipped to China for further processing until the US plant gets going. China had a near-monopoly in rare-earths processing. Had. About six weeks ago, MP Minerals made a deal with Sumitomo in Japan to provide ore for to be processed into rare earths in Japan.[3][4] There's also some company called US Rare Earths, with a mine in Colorado. Their PR shows lots of funding and announcing, not so much manufacturing and shipping. China has been making rare-earth metal threats for years. The main result is that China's share of rare earth mining has dropped from 80% to about 55% as the US and Australia ramp up.[2] Also that the industry has become very profitable. MP Minerals profit more than doubled last year. 10-20 years ago, everybody in this space was going bust. [1] https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-construction-on-texas-rare-earth-magnetics-factory-to-restore-full-us-supply-chain/ https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-constru... [2] https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-rare-earth-mines https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-rare-ea... [3] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/22/business/us-rare-earth-processing-output-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/22/business/us-rar... [4] https://www.pm-review.com/mp-materials-and-sumitomo-corporation-strengthen-supply-of-rare-earths-in-japan/ https://www.pm-review.com/mp-materials-and-sumitomo-corporat...
throwawaykarma 4y ago
[flagged]
jacquesm 4y ago
In a way this is good news. The more China overplays its hand in this undeclared economic war the more likely that Western countries will realize that they are making the exact same mistake with China that they have made with Russia. You can't play nice with dictatorships in the hope that your long term economic interests will be aligned to the point that the other party will be forced to continue to play nice. China has been playing the long game successfully so far, these kind of mistakes are good indicators of what's really going on underneath all that. Just for a moment consider what it would mean if China arbitrarily stopped exporting consumer electronics or any other category of product and what the effect on the West would be. We really should pull back some of that manufacturing and deal with the resulting pollution closer to where the goods are consumed. And while we're at it we may be able to improve the quality a bit as well.
- klodolph 4y ago
  I am less convinced that China is really good at playing the long game, and more convinced that China is subject to many of the same political struggles that we see in the US. It’s just so easy to tap into our fears of China that we want to believe that they’re this smart and ruthless. We look for evidence to validate our feelings. There are deposits of these rare earth minerals elsewhere. There are always more deposits, it’s just that they’re untapped until we deplete our cheaper sources. If China withholds its minerals, we will use more expensive sources, but we will still get the minerals.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    You don't need to be afraid of China to realize that outsourcing a very large fraction of all manufacturing for half the world to a single non-democratic country doesn't serve our interests in the long run.
    - rednerrus 4y ago
      It lead to the longest era of peace and prosperity in the history of the world.
sfifs 4y ago
Not clear from the article or the comments here whether the proposed ban is on the magnets themselves or the technology to manufacture the magnets. The words read both ways. Anyone has seen/has insight into the original proposal in Chinese?
- gscott 4y ago
  In the past the ban has been on the raw materials. Japan is setup to process raw rare earth materials so it affected them badly.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
I am going to bet that Xi is severely overplaying his hand. They need to provide 1 billion people. I remember even an outbreak over porkmeat (1 disease) and milk powder was a national emergency. There's even a whole army of fishing boats... China is not self reliant on food and if a war would break out, China is going to be in scrambles pretty fast. Sure, They can contain protests in a region of China, but not across the country. Unfortunately, i think we'll have to find out sooner or later.
russiasux 4y ago
Did anyone else see this and think: Man, they must have discovered some weird defense industry application and this will be the first remembered clue that future me had that the worldwide shit was hitting the fan.?
- djmips 4y ago
  Drones?
stevespang 4y ago
[dead]
phoenixreader 4y ago
This is in direct retaliation of US ban on chip technology export. In fact, you can even find their rationale for doing so on this pro-China reddit thread from six months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/y9c1n4/china_should_retaliate_indirectly_by_choking_off/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/y9c1n4/china_should_r...
mattparcens 4y ago
381 comments so far and not a single Insane Clown Posse joke?!?
webmaven 4y ago
I have a feeling that this move would just accelerate the adoption of the newer high temperature superconductor magnets (of the sort that have recently been upending fusion reactor designs).
navigate8310 4y ago
Does it include magnetic ferrite cores and toroids?
KyleBerezin 4y ago
This issue has been a long time coming and China has warned us about it at least 10 years ago (probably longer). We used to have a mine in California called Mountain pass mine, but it had a toxic spill in the early 00's and never reopened due to Chinese competition. There were plans to reactivate the mine, and it looks like it is now producing more than 12% of the worlds production (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rare-earths.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rare-earth...)
animitronix 4y ago
Steak all the tech like they steal ours.

342 points by moose_man 4y ago

China long-term strategizes while the US often twiddles its thumbs and belatedly responds (it's waking up with the export controls on chip manufacturing tech, but it should have done that a decade ago).

dmix 4y ago
Why should the US instigate trade wars so hard? Why not be pro-free trade as possible (even if it's imbalanced) while investing heavily in their own self-reliance. That sounds more win-win to me than throwing gasoline on the fire when there's little practical self-realiance replacements in the near term without bigger consequences than the alternative. It's a dangerous game to play without substantial and subsequent investment domestically and among closer partner countries in stuff like manufacturing and mining - ahead of time. Pure competition instead of using bully tactics while only reacting appropriately when the gambles don't play out.
- ddoolin 4y ago
  IMO it's because shifting towards self-reliance usually means shifting investment away from international investment and implementing protectionist regulations which are seen as economically hostile towards other states. So perhaps just the act of shifting towards domestic investment and protection will be taken as instigation. I agree with you, though, and I think the "icing on the cake" instigations are in large part political maneuvers.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > should the US instigate trade wars so hard I'm not suggesting instigation; China has been playing hardball for a long time now. > without substantial and subsequent investment domestically and among closer partner countries in stuff like manufacturing and mining this is what China is willing to do but the U.S. isn't (until very recently), which has put the U.S. at a huge disadvantage
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  China had (and still has) higher tariffs on U.S. goods decades ago. They don’t respect copyright laws, use tech for spying, and steal technology. How is the US starting a trade war?
  - dmix 4y ago
    I didn't say they started it. I explicitly said at a known imbalance. Because without significant preperation you just make it worse where both sides lose. Expecting China to not steal and cheat when it's a core part of their modern culture is a losing game. Expecting some demographic way-too-used to being poor via gov policy, a long history of alleged victimization by the US being the root cause of ALL their problems sold by propaganda for 50yrs+, and totally obedient to a hyper central government built on top of reality denial (aka "saving face"). ...idk I feel like the only real alternative is investment into self reliance and getting whatever concessions you can via positive trade actions until then. It's like fighting piracy with copyright laws when everyone pirates movies and Netflix doesn't exist and you have to go to Blockbuster. And allegedly if we do ban piracy we'll eventually get downloadable movies in an indefinite amount of time because our gov will suddenly care and save us.
thrashh 4y ago
A little over 10 years ago, Xi Jinping came into power. The ship massively changed direction with Xi. He literally made his own term limit forever 5 years ago. China 10 years before is way different.
nonethewiser 4y ago
China thinks in medium term but it gets confused for long term. Authoritarianism is inherently unstable. It looks like long term until you realize their government cannot reliably transition power. Even with recent measures against China, the U.S. is far more open to China than China is to the U.S.

moose_man 4y ago

"China is estimated to hold an about 84% share of the global market in neodymium magnets and an over 90% interest in samarium cobalt magnets. Japan, meanwhile, has about 15% of the neodymium magnet market and a less-than-10% share of that for samarium cobalt. If China bans the export of such technologies, it would be difficult for the United States and Europe, which do not traditionally manufacture rare earth magnets, to newly enter the market, thus making those countries totally dependent on China, according to a European source. Beijing has been investing in facilities to manufacture magnets at low cost through large-scale production, which could lead to Japan losing its market share in the future. The draft revision says the export ban and restrictions are aimed at protecting “national security” and are in the “public interest of society.” Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration has positioned magnets as a key factor in China’s economic growth and security." This is not normal decoupling, we're in a full on economic war.

verdverm 4y ago
We've been in Cold War 2 for a while. It's hard to see the other two options as better alternatives. (hot war & capitulation) The West learned a lot during the first cold war and will outlast. Authoritarianism has a problem with corruption and not telling the leader the truth of reality.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Time will tell. We live interesting times.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Sadly, the West is looking more and more authoritarian though.
  - augment001 4y ago
    Unfortunately so, but by comparison to China it has a very long way to go.

hunglee2 4y ago

is this an attempt to suppress the innovation rate of other countries?

edgyquant 4y ago
It’s likely them firing back due to US tightening chip exports.
- TomK32 4y ago
  This is really the best they could come up with?
- cm2012 4y ago
  I think its for the best to find new rare earth sources outside of China now anyway, before any great power struggles.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - samus 4y ago
    There are lots of sources; it's just very environmentally damaging and/or expensive to extract them. And so far China could, for various reasons, do it way more cheaply than most others. Seems this is going to change...
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  Or the battery minerals/components rules for EV tax credits
PKop 4y ago
It's about avoiding counter-party risk and strengthening domestic supply chains against uncertain economic, geopolitical and military future. Certainly there is the element of "don't strengthen your adversaries" too. Why would they want to make the West stronger (if they can avoid it) if the West is a potential military threat?

jmclnx 4y ago

I read "Rare Earths" are nor really rare. But the article did say extracting these elements cheaply causes a lot of environmental damage, which as we know, China is perfectly fine with. I also read the US is close to opening a "mining" site for Rear Earths, but not sure where or for what elements.

zdragnar 4y ago
They are rare in the sense that they tend to be extremely diffuse, rather than having nice, massive veins of concentrated ore or elemental metal like you might find for copper or bauxite. Since they tend to be diffuse, mining them requires disrupting significant volumes of earth and rock, plus the chemicals needed to separate them out of the less interesting material that gets dug up. The cheapest way to do that is to strip mine large tracts of land and not reclaim or treat any water used in the process, which will likely be full of heavy metals and other chemicals. If we don't like how other countries do it, we have to be willing to do it ourselves, which means years delayed supply chains (basically every mine in the US is protested and delayed through the legal system) and higher prices for the refined materials (it costs more to do it right).
- akiselev 4y ago
  It's called "liquid-liquid extraction" [1] and requires crushing the rock and mixing it with an extractant (see D2EHPA [2] which is also used in uranium extraction) into a nasty acidic slurry. It 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 using even more toxic chemicals, each of which leaves behind a different hazardous waste. Fun(?) fact: This process looks a lot like the alkali extraction process used to make cocaine, DMT, and a variety of other drugs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid%E2%80%93liquid_extracti... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric_acid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di-(2-ethylhexyl)phosphoric_ac...
  - 4y ago

dirtyid 4y ago

Export controls on manufacturing tech not materials, which I don't imagine is particularly enforcable. Will just get transhipped through middlemen, but I can imagine increasing price astronomically for competitive advantage.

petilon 4y ago

Relevant: Huge rare earth metals discovery in Arctic Sweden https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64253708 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64253708 But it will take 10 to 15 years to process it.

stainablesteel 4y ago
> Well, we're not exactly sure what elements they have found yet. What they have said is that they've - they will be producing at least two elements. One is called neodymium, and the other is called praseodymium still missing a lot of them unfortunately, the rest are only found within chinese territory i had last heard of the us military trying to target specific parts of the asteroid belt to make up for their lack of natural resources in this regard, and given their recent feats over the last few years with asteroids i have high hopes for that

nortonham 4y ago

well now that they basically manufacture everything we're fucked unless we--at the very least--try to get along with china

agentultra 4y ago

Aren't the materials to make rare-earth magnets... not actually that rare? It's only rare in the sense of their dispersal in the earth's crust, this making it a rather dirty and ecologically disruptive activity sourcing them. The US could theoretically start producing rare-earth metals, couldn't they?

halJordan 4y ago
Yes, but it trivializes the issue. You might ask why colonies needed to import finished goods from the motherland when they had all this wood and iron available.
- arroz 4y ago
  This is not the same thing Colonies many times weren’t even allowed to produce manufactured goods There might be some learning curve but the extraction of rare earth materials should be well documented, it used to be done in the US I don’t know about the manufacturing of goods from the extracted elements though.

waterheater 4y ago

That's okay. The US has polymagnets, which are a paradigm shift in magnetics. https://www.polymagnet.com/ https://www.polymagnet.com/

nyokodo 4y ago
That's super cool. But these have been around for years, has the paradigm really shifted so as to totally replace all Chinese magnet manufacturing?
scythe 4y ago
In the interest of keeping the recent magnetic materials breakthroughs in one subthread, here's the paper I've been excited about for months: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204315 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202204... "Direct formation of hard magnetic tetrataenite in bulk alloy castings" It has long been known that iron-nickel and iron-cobalt alloys form a stable tetragonal phase, the L1_0, at standard conditions, which is a hard magnetic material with a high magnetic energy product comparable to the best rare-earth magnets. In fact, L1_0 FeCo is predicted to be the best magnet of any material that has been modeled. But these phases are not stable at high temperatures, and the relaxation time to form them at normal temperatures is expected to be on the order of millions of years. L1_0 FeNi has been found in meteorites, but these are extremely rare, and the damage caused by impact limits the usefulness of the material. In the recent work by Ivanov et al, L1_0 iron-nickel alloy was successfully prepared at macroscale by precipitation from a melt containing large proportions (on the order of 10%) of phosphorus and carbon. This is the first time that bulk L1_0 FeNi has been produced on Earth's surface. This potentially opens the door to producing strong magnets from just iron and nickel. For a sense of scale, annual nickel production is about two million tonnes per year, while neodymium production is less than ten thousand tonnes per year, with neodymium representing a fraction of that. The material availability for producing strong magnets therefore jumps by more than an order of magnitude.
beambot 4y ago
IIRC, Polymagnets give unique field patterns but do not replicate the overall field strength of neodymium magnets. A much better alternative is someone like Niron Magnetics, who build nitrogen-doped iron magnets that demonstrate field strengths that are (roughly) equivalent to rare-earths: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34359383

Animats 4y ago

I'm trying to find out if the rare earth extraction plant that MP Minerals was building in Alliance, TX actually got built.[1] Google and Bing pictures are from 2021 and show a vacant lot. If anyone is near there, please go to the corner of Independence and Victory and see how the construction is going. PR: "MP Materials broke ground for its magnet factory at Alliance last April, and completed the building’s shell in September. ... The company plans to start delivering alloy from the Fort Worth plant to General Motors late this year, and magnets in 2025, MP Materials founder James Litinsky said in an annual profit report meeting." MP Minerals already has the largest rare earth mine in the US, at Mountain Pass, CA. That went bankrupt in 2015 because of low-priced competition from China. They finally got a process working that didn't cause major pollution problems. That mine has been back in action since 2018. They only do initial separation at the mine; the ore is shipped to China for further processing until the US plant gets going. China had a near-monopoly in rare-earths processing. Had. About six weeks ago, MP Minerals made a deal with Sumitomo in Japan to provide ore for to be processed into rare earths in Japan.[3][4] There's also some company called US Rare Earths, with a mine in Colorado. Their PR shows lots of funding and announcing, not so much manufacturing and shipping. China has been making rare-earth metal threats for years. The main result is that China's share of rare earth mining has dropped from 80% to about 55% as the US and Australia ramp up.[2] Also that the industry has become very profitable. MP Minerals profit more than doubled last year. 10-20 years ago, everybody in this space was going bust. [1] https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-construction-on-texas-rare-earth-magnetics-factory-to-restore-full-us-supply-chain/ https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-constru... [2] https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-rare-earth-mines https://www.mining-technology.com/features/australia-rare-ea... [3] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/22/business/us-rare-earth-processing-output-japan/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/02/22/business/us-rar... [4] https://www.pm-review.com/mp-materials-and-sumitomo-corporation-strengthen-supply-of-rare-earths-in-japan/ https://www.pm-review.com/mp-materials-and-sumitomo-corporat...

throwawaykarma 4y ago

[flagged]

jacquesm 4y ago

In a way this is good news. The more China overplays its hand in this undeclared economic war the more likely that Western countries will realize that they are making the exact same mistake with China that they have made with Russia. You can't play nice with dictatorships in the hope that your long term economic interests will be aligned to the point that the other party will be forced to continue to play nice. China has been playing the long game successfully so far, these kind of mistakes are good indicators of what's really going on underneath all that. Just for a moment consider what it would mean if China arbitrarily stopped exporting consumer electronics or any other category of product and what the effect on the West would be. We really should pull back some of that manufacturing and deal with the resulting pollution closer to where the goods are consumed. And while we're at it we may be able to improve the quality a bit as well.

klodolph 4y ago
I am less convinced that China is really good at playing the long game, and more convinced that China is subject to many of the same political struggles that we see in the US. It’s just so easy to tap into our fears of China that we want to believe that they’re this smart and ruthless. We look for evidence to validate our feelings. There are deposits of these rare earth minerals elsewhere. There are always more deposits, it’s just that they’re untapped until we deplete our cheaper sources. If China withholds its minerals, we will use more expensive sources, but we will still get the minerals.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  You don't need to be afraid of China to realize that outsourcing a very large fraction of all manufacturing for half the world to a single non-democratic country doesn't serve our interests in the long run.
  - rednerrus 4y ago
    It lead to the longest era of peace and prosperity in the history of the world.

sfifs 4y ago

Not clear from the article or the comments here whether the proposed ban is on the magnets themselves or the technology to manufacture the magnets. The words read both ways. Anyone has seen/has insight into the original proposal in Chinese?

gscott 4y ago
In the past the ban has been on the raw materials. Japan is setup to process raw rare earth materials so it affected them badly.

NicoJuicy 4y ago

I am going to bet that Xi is severely overplaying his hand. They need to provide 1 billion people. I remember even an outbreak over porkmeat (1 disease) and milk powder was a national emergency. There's even a whole army of fishing boats... China is not self reliant on food and if a war would break out, China is going to be in scrambles pretty fast. Sure, They can contain protests in a region of China, but not across the country. Unfortunately, i think we'll have to find out sooner or later.

russiasux 4y ago

Did anyone else see this and think: Man, they must have discovered some weird defense industry application and this will be the first remembered clue that future me had that the worldwide shit was hitting the fan.?

djmips 4y ago
Drones?

stevespang 4y ago

[dead]

phoenixreader 4y ago

This is in direct retaliation of US ban on chip technology export. In fact, you can even find their rationale for doing so on this pro-China reddit thread from six months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/y9c1n4/china_should_retaliate_indirectly_by_choking_off/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/y9c1n4/china_should_r...

mattparcens 4y ago

381 comments so far and not a single Insane Clown Posse joke?!?

webmaven 4y ago

I have a feeling that this move would just accelerate the adoption of the newer high temperature superconductor magnets (of the sort that have recently been upending fusion reactor designs).

navigate8310 4y ago

Does it include magnetic ferrite cores and toroids?

KyleBerezin 4y ago

This issue has been a long time coming and China has warned us about it at least 10 years ago (probably longer). We used to have a mine in California called Mountain pass mine, but it had a toxic spill in the early 00's and never reopened due to Chinese competition. There were plans to reactivate the mine, and it looks like it is now producing more than 12% of the worlds production (https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rare-earths.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2021/mcs2021-rare-earth...)

animitronix 4y ago

Steak all the tech like they steal ours.