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Trade war looms over rare earths

• mdp2021 4y ago
  > China is reportedly considering suspending the export of "certain rare-earth magnet technology" [...] The US, which is heavily dependent on China for rare earths, has been scrambling to find ways to keep its supply chain open > Contrary to what their name suggests, rare earths are abundant[: t]hey are three times more plentiful than copper and twice more than zinc, the two most commonly used industrial metals. // There are an estimated 120 million tons of rare earth deposits worldwide, and the bulk of 44 million tons is in China. // Refining rare earths, however, is a tedious, toxic process. It creates a dangerous cocktail of wastewater, heavy metals and substances such as cadmium, lead and radioactive thorium > In 2010, China froze exports of rare earths to Japan for two years following a dispute over the Senaku Islands. // Since then, Japan and its Western allies ... have been keeping their R&D labs busy looking for ways to develop their own sources of rare earths. // Japan has decided to focus its search not on land, but offshore[; a] recent Japanese study claims that an estimated 16 million tons of rare earths could be extracted from the oceans, enough to supply global demand on a "semi-infinite" basis > surveys from 2011 to 2020 revealed "potentially high-yield deposits"[ - ... t]hat pretty much explains China's compulsion for claiming practically all of the South China Sea as its territory