Rare Earth Elements

Matthew Powell (0:01)

They called it Silver from Clay, and Henri St. Clair de Ville had finally produced enough of it to display as shining bars laying beside France's crown jewels in the Paris Exposition of 1855 Around the same time, Napoleon III was showing off the medal as silverware to his most important dinner guests. It was worth more than gold, the equivalent of $115 per pound. The element itself was everywhere, but no one knew how to separate it into something pure and usable. Still, everyone wanted it. It was shiny, conductive and corrosion-resistant, a technical marvel. And in 1884, the largest single cast of it was installed as the pyramid atop the Washington Monument. Only two years later, a 22-year-old in a woodshed behind his family's home in Oberlin, Ohio, would finally figure out how to extract the element from the earth all around him. The metal quickly went from a royal luxury to a material entire industries were built around. By 1893, its price had fallen to just 78 cents a pound. It's the material you know today as aluminum.

The phone in your pocket, the laptop at your desk, even the speakers or in-ears you're listening to this podcast on. Inside is some level of aluminum.

But there are also elements you may never have heard of that are equally as important.

Rare earth elements. And they give us a familiar problem.

Scott McCall (1:43)

If you go in your backyard and you dig up some soil or rocks, you'll probably have a few hundred parts per million of rare earths in there. But getting that concentrated to a level where you can actually economically extract it is a challenge.

Matthew Powell (1:55)

And extracting them is only the first problem. The real challenge is turning what's in the ground into something industry can actually use, all the way through the supply chain.

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Scott McCall (3:51)

The top row of that is the lanthanides, and there are 15 elements there.

Matthew Powell (3:56)

That's Scott McCall, a materials physicist at Lawrence Livermore.

Scott McCall (4:00)

And then there are a couple of other elements that behave very similarly chemically to these that are yttrium and scandium. Those together make up the rare earth elements.

Matthew Powell (4:09)

You may not notice them on a page of the periodic table, but you most certainly feel the effects of them.

Scott McCall (4:15)

To realize how much of your daily life you actually benefit from having rare earth elements, they're in your phosphors, in your screens, they're magnets in all kinds of places, they're in your cell phone.

Matthew Powell (4:27)

The spices of modern technology.

You don't use much. A pinch here, a pinch there, but leave them out and the whole thing falls apart.

Scott McCall (4:38)

They're essential all over the place, making the quality of your daily life better.

Matthew Powell (4:43)

The reason comes down to one main idea. Rare earths make extraordinarily strong magnets.

Scott McCall (4:50)

And that means that the size of the magnet you need to put in a motor is that much smaller, so you can make these compact, really high-efficiency motors that enable all sorts of things.

Matthew Powell (5:01)

Engineers measure the strength of magnets by how much magnetic energy you can pack into a material. An energy product measured as mega Gauss-Eerstedts.

Older steel magnets might measure only a few mega Gauss-Eerstedts.

Scott McCall (5:15)

Now they're up towards 50, even 55 mega Gauss-Eerstedts, so we've got things that are factors of 10 and 20 better than what the best magnets are without rare earths.

Matthew Powell (5:24)

With their enhanced strength, these magnets can pack a bigger punch in a smaller package, enabling nearly every modern technological advancement from handheld devices to gigantic offshore turbines.