Henk: a couple of points: my information is that Japan / Japanese companies actually have a significant stockpile of dysprosium that would last them for several months if supplies were to remain cut off. Interestingly the rare earth that they are most short of is samarium, used in the samarium-cobalt magnets for various high temperature applications. It’s interesting to me because samarium remains just about the cheapest of the rare earths in the market.

Regarding work that the Japanese are doing to reduce usage of dysprosium: they have been working for a number of years, in a number of research groups, on this very challenge. Work was presented at the Rare Earth Permanent Magnet Workshop at the beginning of September 2010 in Slovenia, on this and other subjects. Coercivity is maintained, but less dysprosium is used; the dysprosium that is used, is skillfully placed at the grain boundaries of the main 2-14-1 magnetic phase, where it is of most use in combating demagnetization from heat or other energy sources. By placing the dysprosium preferentially in this manner, less of it is needed in the initial alloy.

Would be nice to see this catch on like Lithium-ion phrase has.

Went to website and looked and it’s in the bottom of the page #3.

http://www.dyson.com/technology/ddmTabbed.asp?tab=where

If you read this excerpt from the origins of the formation of the IEA, and replace oil with rare earths, the parallels are striking [1].

“During the Middle East War crisis of 1973-1974, the main industrial
countries became painfully aware of their vulnerability to the new
economic power of the oil producer countries. For the industrial countries, the sting in that crisis derived from their sudden need to respond to the oil embargo by a number of Arab producers and from the price spike that too oil prices rapidly to historic and damagingly high levels. Perhaps even more troublesome, however, was the realization that, having accepted for some years the short-term luxury of growing oil import dependence, the industrial countries were themselves largely responsible for the very predicament in which they suddenly found themselves.

As discomforting as that realization might have been at the time, it
became the wellspring of the industrial countries’ response and was a
necessary step in building the new institutional systems which could
make the problems more manageable. One promising element was the
notion that if those countries bore their share of the responsibility for
causing the crisis, they might find within themselves the means of
resolving or controlling the situation in the future. Their contributions to
the extent of the crisis had included excessive reliance on oil generally
and imported oil in particular, insufficient investment in indigenous oil
exploration and exploitation, in diversification of energy sources and in
the development of energy technologies. To this list must be added weak conservation and energy efficiency measures, inadequate collection and use of data on the operation of the oil market and the absence of arrangements for workable systems of oil supply shortfall management.

Increasing the industrial countries’ vulnerability still further was their
capstone failure to organize themselves properly by means of institutions designed to deal successfully with those problems and others to come in the years ahead.”

The only question is, where are we now? I’d hazard a guess at 1971. We know what the future holds, yet perhaps we need an actual crisis to galvanize collective action.

[1] IEA, “The History of the IEA 1974-1994 Vol I”, 1994, Available from: http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/1990/1-ieahistory.pdf

Yet even now there is not the will in governmental and financial circles to finance non-Chinese sources. Every time one of the juniors trying to develop an REE deposit is driven to the market for more money, they have to beg, and accept onerous discounts to market or warrant issues to “sweeten” the deal. The recent Molycorp float was a case in point. Not only did Molycorp have to reduce their offer price, they STILL couldn’t get it all away. A comment which stuck in my craw was one from a Wall Street institutional investor: “It seems too much to pay…”.

Perhaps he won’t think so when he can’t get a new Blackberry, or his new Prius is delayed, or the green energy projects he is invested in collapse for lack of raw materials…

I guess if not today then eventually. They have been saying for some time now to the rest of the world u better get it in gear. Their own internal demands alone will eventually cause them to “short” the world market.

They have simply takin advantage of every REE opportunity over just about everyone else, plain and simple.

Now hopefully the U.S. and others can make a popping sound, the sound u hear when someone has pulled their head outta their azz.