Submitted by future168life t3_yilbyf in Futurology
The article makes it sound that this product was seemed basically impossible to produce at scale or economically until someone just decided to do a backyard experiment.
It was so simple nobody ever tried? And voila, a new world economy?
What am I missing?
Also, why does this stuff to only get mined in China? Is it because only they are willing to dig up enough ground to make it worthwhile, thereby ruining their land? There are lots of places people have shown extreme willingness to destroy the future in the search for profit today.
Edit How cheap is china producing this dust?
It was discovered accidentally. The mixing with phosphorous sounds like standard PhD research stuff; take this bit of chemistry no one has examined closely and work it around to see what happens. Most of the time it doesn't really go anywhere exciting but in this case they found something unexpected and potentially game changing.
I really hope it plays out, it would really help with a lot of issues if we could replace rare earths with nickel-iron alloys. That would be sweet.
It used to be mined all in California. China then sank price of mineralls in the short term to put everyone else out of business until they controlled the market.
>Also, why does this stuff to only get mined in China?
Because China is the place were rich ores in high numbers are found, while other place were more important before China started digging, they just cannot get the amount done (like South Africa or California), and now China supplies 80-90% of the worlds demand
The ore in Mongolia contain 3-5% RE, a source in Germany contains 0.5% RE
Greenland might be a future RE export with the ice melting the sources are easier to mine
I get that.
But why does china get so much more of it?
So many valuable, difficult to extract things are mined in many places. Have they just not looked everywhere yet because the demand is so new?
Geology.
Same reason the middle east has lots of oil and Australia has lots of Uranium.
Blind luck / winning the geological lottery
There’s something relatively unique about the deposits in china that makes them very economical to mine.
Apparently, the extraction and purification of rare earths gets really unpleasantly toxic. China can get away with things that might be harder to do elsewhere.
Strong strong possibility the material behaves metal like, but nowhere near as powerfully as well
Potentially huge, with the proviso that they don't know if the tetrataenite they have made has the same properties as the tetrataenite that occurs naturally. You would think that would be easy to confirm but the article doesn't say if it has been done or not.
It's somewhat crazy that it was found by accident but it backs up a point I've made before about battery technology. With the entire spectrum of materials science to play with, it's very hard to know what will turn up.
Can’t wait for this to never leave testing phase and this gets reposted for the 10th time in 50 years
Could this help speed up MicroGrids?
Let's pull down those towers!
The following submission statement was provided by /u/future168life:
If this substance is mass-produced, it will impact the dominance of mainland China, the largest supplier of rare earths with 80% of the global market. In addition to being used in smartphones, electric vehicles, nuclear magnetic resonance machines, etc., rare earths can also be used in military fields such as fighter planes and missiles, and have considerable strategic value. According to data previously published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tetrataenite consists of 50% iron and 50% nickel, with iron and nickel atoms arranged alternately in a regular periodic crystal structure. It produces a hard magnet, that is, the direction of magnetization does not change easily, and its magnetic properties are close to that of rare-earth magnets. With the rapid development of industries such as electric vehicles, the global demand for rare earths has been increasing in recent years. U.S. President Joe Biden has previously expressed support for increasing rare earth production, and the European Union also sees diversification of rare earth supply chains.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yilbyf/british_and_austrian_scientists_have_developed/iuj8v23/
troll science. use a solar panel to make the electromagnet in the wind turbine.
future168life OP t1_iuj8v23 wrote
If this substance is mass-produced, it will impact the dominance of mainland China, the largest supplier of rare earths with 80% of the global market. In addition to being used in smartphones, electric vehicles, nuclear magnetic resonance machines, etc., rare earths can also be used in military fields such as fighter planes and missiles, and have considerable strategic value. According to data previously published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tetrataenite consists of 50% iron and 50% nickel, with iron and nickel atoms arranged alternately in a regular periodic crystal structure. It produces a hard magnet, that is, the direction of magnetization does not change easily, and its magnetic properties are close to that of rare-earth magnets. With the rapid development of industries such as electric vehicles, the global demand for rare earths has been increasing in recent years. U.S. President Joe Biden has previously expressed support for increasing rare earth production, and the European Union also sees diversification of rare earth supply chains.