yesterday we saw a flood of posts intended to cast doubt on renewable technologies. The basis for this flood of concern (from people on the DU/EE forum who are advocating for nuclear energy instead of renewable energy) were two popular press articles that claimed a looming shortage of "rare earth metals" posed a critical constraint for development of wind power and hybrid electric vehicles.
There was a brief mention in the news story that the demand for these elements has dropped recently and that mining operations that had closed with reduced demand were having their economic potential re-evaluated.
That is pretty much all the information that was provided to support the contention that a "shortage" existed.
What enabled the article to have the desired impact was that the topic contained the word "rare". This implicitly creates the impression in an uninformed reader that these elements are, indeed, rare.
That is pure bullshit.
Rare earth element
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rare earth ore
As defined by IUPAC, rare earth elements or rare earth metals are a collection of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, namely scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanoids.<1> Scandium and yttrium are considered rare earths since they tend to occur in the same ore deposits as the lanthanoids and exhibit similar chemical properties.
The term "rare earth" arises from the minerals from which they were first isolated, which were uncommon oxide-type minerals (earths) found in Gadolinite extracted from one mine in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. However, with the exception of the highly-unstable promethium, rare earth elements are found in relatively high concentrations in the earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element in the earth's crust at 68 parts per million. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_elementWe are seeing 2 things with the health care debate related to this; one, the use of public relations strategies designed to dupe people at the grass roots level, and two, much of this public relations effort is funded by the energy companies as a head start on hamstringing the Obama administration's efforts to address our total lack of a long term, well thought out energy policy.
I urge readers of DU/EE to be cautious over the coming months as the public relations organs of the energy companies work overtime to manufacture doubt, uncertainty and fear (FUD) related to any alternative to coal or petroleum.
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