Rare Earth Elements - YouTube

Welcome! You're just in time to learn about lanthanides!

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It's a- it's the periodic table of elements, it's- it's wonderful.

You got your noble gases over here, and hydrogen, the building block of everything in the universe over here,

you got your alkali metals and gold and other lovely regular metals in the middle here.

What is this?

What are these elements that aren't.. in.. They're not in the table proper, they're like, in their own table.

What makes you guys so special? Those are the lanthanides on top and the actinides on the bottom.

And they're down there because they can't be trusted around the other elements!

That's not true. They actually could be a part of the table,

but if they became part of the table, the table would be too big to put on a piece of paper,

so they sort of shove them down to the bottom. Basically, like Alaska.

You always sort of like disembody Alaska

and bring it down because, it's just too big. You gotta- it just big... gotta break it off.

They are actually kind of crazy actinides are, uh,

they contain all the elements that we make nuclear weapons out of. But the lanthanides on top there.

Uh, they're actually responsible for a lot of the coolest things that we have as 21st century citizens:

laptops, cell phones, plasma screen TVs, solar panels, wind turbines,

the catalytic converter on your car, that makes your car not so horrible for the environment.

And also the pollution control equipment that we stick on top of big, gigantic coal-fired power plants

All that stuff is made possible by our friends, the lanthanides.

Yeah! Rare-earth elements for president!

Oh, hold on a sec.

Uh, yeah, mhm. N- no!

[bleep]

Because our rare-earth Lanthanide friends are so frickin' awesome of course,

they have to have a dark side.

Despite their name, a lot of rare-earths are really common.

They're called rare because they're hard to find in large concentrations.

Th-they like to mix together with a bunch of other minerals and elements underground,

there- there's never, like, a vein full of Indium.

So extracting rare-earths, and especially refining them, is a huge pain in the ass.

In addition to giving you a huge pain in the ass,

refining rare-earths also gives you, uh, mountains of low-level radioctive waste

And I mean, who wants to deal with that.

I'm actually going to give you a second to think about who would want to deal with all that.

Yeah, it's China.

In the past 20 years we've become extremely dependent on rare-earth metals for our, you know, everything.

And since none of us want gigantic piles of toxic waste dumped in our backyards,

we've left about 95% of the processing of rare-earth metals to Chinese refineries,

which are hardly regulated at all, and in some cases just totally illegal.

And believe me when I say that they're making an unholy godforsaken mess over there.

I'm talking giant sizzling lakes of acidic waste.

Oh God, I can't breathe. [heayy breathing]

But the Chinese are also totally making bank off of all of this and they're also wielding a lot of political power.

Like, if China got angry at the Unites States tomorrow,

they could be like, "No more neodymium for you!"

And then we wouldn't have any neodymium, which would mean, like, no new wind turbines or uh, like

high-powered electric motors for- for hybrid cars.

So other countries, including the United States, have cautiously begun building their

much more expensive, much cleaner rare-earth refineries.

Probably just in time for the bubble to pop on all of this stuff.

But we still have to figure out something to do with all that toxic by-product.

Nobody has come up with a really good solution to that problem

Just recently a rare-earth mine in California opened back up after being shut down in 1998 for toxic leakage

Now the company- promising that they've got it all figured out.

No big deal.

One of their solutions involves covering toxic waste water pools

with interlocked 18 sided plastic balls to prevent evaporation.

Yeah, plastic balls.

Covering a radioactive sludge pond.. I'm not filled with an overwhelming sense of confidence in that idea,

but the state of California seems to be satisfied.

21st century problems, y'all.

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