Well, that´s what they´re saying here [read it on Slashdot.org]

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not gone, just used, right? We don't actually put them in nuclear reactions to change them to other elements. At the very worst, we could mine landfills and find more. Gallium is in every LED--lots of them in landfills I'm sure.

Ok--we could fully use all easily-accessible gallium perhaps--in that case, time to find a substitute, and there are plenty with their own advantages and disadvantages, but we're humans, we can adapt.

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This sounds like Club of Rome stuff I heard in the '70s. We were supposed to be out of quite a few metals by now. The problem is that they based their argument on the idea that proven reserves were the sum total of all the metal existing on the planet.

Looking here, for example, gallium is apparently usually recovered when processing bauxite, which isn't terribly rare, and that is far from the only source.

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I've answered this nonsense twice already on this forum. Basically, when experience suggests you can reliably find stuff by going to look for it, you don't bother going to look for it until you need to.

An awful lot of these rarer elements come out as byproducts of mining other things, eg zinc, etc, but you don't bother extracting it unless the price is high enough. The prices of most of these things fell to low levels a few years ago, and some mines stopped bothering extracting them. The prices have mostly gone up again now, a lot, and they'll start extracting them again...

World supplies of Francium have dropped by half in the past 22 minutes.

Just in, "Administratium Element found to be self replicating". The stock appears to be doubling every 10 years, scientist are concerned that this might weight down the planet crushing the turtles below.

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You forget lawyerium which doubles every 5 years.

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iridium is a rather interesting element. They use it to make platinum less brittle if I remember right.

Anyway - what I find interesting is how someone can claim we are running out of something when we can't possibly survey the entire crust of the earth to really *know* how much of anything there is. Iridium does not naturally occur here on earth so yes - its rare... but from what I understand it IS common in meteorites. And there have been more than enough strikes here on earth to supply us for quite some time I would think.

Is this correct?

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There is actually a substantial difference between the abundance of something in the earth's crust, (which can in general be estimated by statistical means by sampling the tendency of somehting to occur in typical common rock types), and its useful abundance in order to mine it (estimated from known economic deposits).

For example there are extraordinary amounts (in comparison to mankind's stock) of gold in the sea, but at an average concentration it is not economic to extract it.

As another example, copper is, on average, rather less abundant than you might expect given that it is the second most important non-ferrous metal in industry (after aluminium; on a par with manganese and zinc): but it is hardly more abundant than the "rare earth element" neodymium, and rather less abundant than such specialities as tungsten, vanadium and zirconium. But it has a useful tendency to occur in large concentrations which are convenient for mining. This is because vulcanism tends to mobilise copper and concentrate it by a kind of fractional distillation. The same sort of consideration leads to certain elements having a strong tendency to occur together.

Another example, gallium, mentioned by OP, is really fairly common stuff, only slightly less abundant than lithium whose production is 1000 times higher, and more abundant than lead whose production is 100,000 times higher. However useful concentrated deposits do not appear to occur, and it tends to be produced as a byproduct from other extractions, including aluminium, zinc and coal. No doubt if it was worth it, production could be substantially scaled up.

Even more alarmism was recently attached to indium, only 5 years left some people said after low prices led the Chinese to stop production. There is some uncertainty attached to the abundance of indium, perhaps because we produce so little of it (75 tonnes a year). But it is around about the same abundance as silver, whose production is 100 times higher. It was amazing how the stuff came back into production when its price went up by a factor of 10. The wikipedia entry on Indium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium has a more convincing explanation than I can give of what rubbish these claims of running out of such stuff are.

It is always philosophically possible that places we haven't looked will prove to be completely different from those we have looked already. But it seems more likely that the laws of statistics will continue to operate. If we have had past success in extracting, say, iridium, from zinc tailings (as I believe they do, along with other platinum series metals), and certain other standard locations, it seems likely that they will continue to be able to do so.

I read that the abundance of iridium in the earth's crust is extremely uncertain (probably a result of its tendency to be found in meterorite-derived material, an dthus less dispersed than most other elements). Wikipedia presents numbers from a variety of sources given at between between 0.001 ppm and 0.000 000 3 ppm, though going to the source of the latter number I think it should read 0.000 003 ppm; but the origin of that is in turn not clear, and might just be a mistake. The annual production of it is 3 tonnes, which is a great deal if the lower estimate of the abundance is correct, and hardly any at all if the former is - the former is about the same as gold whose production is 500 times higher.

That stuff sucks the life out of you.

I should know.

Re: the rest of it... I'm running around in circles, arms akimbo, in panic over yet more doom and gloo... wait a minute... No I'm not... I'm just dulled and bored by yet one more headline in the constant barrage of doom and gloom news about how bad people are, and woe is us, we're such destroyers, and the world is going to end, and all the bad things are happening...



yawn

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I read in wikipedia that something like 90+% of the rare earth's mined come from China. If, somehow, those deposits actually are running dry then I think it's a bit presumptuous to assume there aren't any more anywhere else in the world.

I remember about 5 years ago there was a tantalum shortage scare. Just the notion that tantalum was in short supply drove the price way up. Tantalum is used in high-reliability electrolytic capacitors, and allows for the creation of denser capacitors than those using aluminum. The industry quickly re-tooled to use Niobium and for a while it looked as if we might have to switch. But, alas there was no true shortage, so I can still buy my tantalum capacitors at nominal prices.

.

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http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...033/prj:6/.png

but none of those are rare earth elements....

'course, it turns out most rare earth elements are actually pretty common

Of course, the OP doesn't take into account recycling and possible substitutes, which is what always happens when a resource is perceived by man to be running out.

Move along, nothing to see here....

- Maha Vailo

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