Gold-rush era discards could fuel high-tech items

Associated Press

SACRAMENTO, Calif.

Across the West, early miners digging for gold, silver and copper had no idea that one day, something else very valuable would be buried in the piles of dirt and rocks they tossed aside.

There’s a rush in the U.S. to find key components of cellphones, televisions, weapons systems, wind turbines, MRI machines and the regenerative brakes in hybrid cars, and old mine tailings piles just might be the answer. They may contain a group of versatile minerals the periodic table called rare earth elements.

“Uncle Sam could be sitting on a gold mine,” said Larry Meinert, director of the mineral-resource program for the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va.

The USGS and Department of Energy are on a nationwide scramble for deposits of the elements that make magnets lighter, bring balanced hues to fluorescent lighting and color to the touch screens of smartphones in order to break the Chinese stranglehold on those supplies.

They were surprised to find that the critical elements could be in plain sight in piles of rubble otherwise considered eyesores and toxic waste. One era’s junk could turn out to be this era’s treasure.

“Those were almost never analyzed for anything other than what they were mining for,” Meinert said. “If they turn out to be valuable, that is a win-win on several fronts — getting us off our dependence on China and having a resource we didn’t know about.”

The 15 rare earth elements were discovered long after the gold rush began to wane, but demand for them took off only over the past 10 years as electronics became smaller and more sophisticated. They begin with number 57 Lanthanum and end with 71 Lutetium, a group of metallic chemical elements that are not rare as much as they are just difficult to mine because they occur in tiny amounts and often are stuck to one anther.

Unlike metals higher up on the table such as silver and gold, there’s no good agent for dissolving elements so closely linked in atomic structure without destroying the target. It makes mining for them tedious and expensive.

“The reason they haven’t been explored for in the U.S. was because as long as China was prepared to export enough rare earths to fill the demand, everything was fine — like with the oil cartels. When China began to use them as a political tool, people began to see the vulnerability to the U.S. economy to having one source of rare earth elements,” said Ian Ridley, director of the USGS Central Mineral and Environmental Resources Science Center in Colorado.