What an outstanding report. Thanks.

Enlightening and very informative. Thank you for this video

Stefan Gath is right on the money about recycling vs. primary metal costs. Aluminum is a good example because it takes a lot of electricity to make aluminum from bauxite. But it takes much less electricity to melt and cast aluminum scrap. The problem with rare earths is that there's a whole flowchart of chemical processes for separating them if they're mixed together.

Japan located the rare earths about 1,850 kilometers off the shore of Minamitori Island. Engineers located the minerals in 10-meter-deep cores taken from sea floor sediment. Mapping the cores revealed and area of approximately 2,500 square kilometers containing rare earths. Japan's engineers estimate there's 16 million tons of rare earths down there. That's five times the amount of the rare earth elements ever mined since 1900. According to Business Insider, there's "enough yttrium to meet the global demand for 780 years, dysprosium for 730 years, europium for 620 years, and terbium for 420 years."

I think that’s very good please continue your urban mining this is very very important to recycle everything that we can

Metal mines in some places in the US are high in rare earths. They don't even need to dig them out - they were already dug up. Fantastic video! Keep it up! I will built Jacob university in your support the near future

Yes, this was a very informative documentary about raw earth metals which have the atomic numbers between # 55 and 70. It's interesting that all of these raw earth metals have the electron sub-shell sequence of:: 2 - 8 - 18 - 18 - X - 8 - X - 2, where X is mainly the only variable. QED

Valuable information not acquired in normal everyday information research. Thank You !

Dude thank you so much for doing all you do. I'm sure you make an incredibly great living and all with YT but just know your high quality work is helping many many students let alone curious future engineers!

I really enjoyed watching and learning a tremendous amount of knowledge from this documentary

Very insightful video and encouraging showing new developments. Thank You

Love the intro , lab coated scientist , spooky setting in the wilds, foreign language speaking specialists, great one two three start , could be used anywhere .

Oooh just found this and I'm very excited!!!!

narrator and background music theme makes this video feels as if we are discovering new species of aliens .

Good documentary. Great to passively listen to or watch at work

It would make more sense to find a way to extract the rare earths concentrated in Coal ash (instead of dumping the ash in rivers and streams).

So they want to strip mine the ocean for rare earths so they can build a smart car that will help save the planet from such evils as mining?....got it!

I wrote my thesis in the mining of poly metallic manganese nodules on the seafloor. Always great to see it brought up.

Thanks Chris for all the good work so blow it up not literally but you can expose more than I can with your equipment love your show man keep it comin

Excellent production! Wow! Better than a BBC documentary. Well done!

Very interesting. Thanks

I've been hoping for this documentary to come along. It makes sense.

Thanks for very interesting information. We must use all our efforts to reuse the wast materials in complete way to be able to live on earth.

Got to love the subtitles, they are hilarious

I worked at Phoenix Project to restart the mine at Mountain Pass California. It was an exciting project and I'm proud that I could play a small part in the effort to rebuild the plant and make it more efficient.

I had no idea. Super informative. Thank you!

Great insight to rare earth

Great video! There are others out there featuring their recycling from consumer products.

Manufacturing is a very hard work. First requirement is to find willing and able workers.

Great review , regards to you from Australia .

A lot of knowledgeable things . Thanks

I really like your documentaries .

Given the sheer number of hard disks I operate and trash (after failure), I've learnt to disassemble them into their component parts (especially the magnets) and slowly accumulating them in weight to eventually sell.

A critically important step in the implementation of alternative energy and modern technology is figuring out how to use common materials, cheaper materials, to make the devices we want. Both battery and PV tech are making advances in precisely that direction. The push for ever cheaper materials is helping greatly in this.

Thanks for the video..

Fantastic video! Keep it up!

This has been on Hawaii's radar for 30 years now.. Someone wanted to build a refining plant in Hilo years ago.. It got shot down fast..

Great video, very informative. Im glad there are people working on this stuff.

Australia is one enormous rare earth mine with no real interest in mining it.

The US has allowed color television picture tubes to be put into land fills for many years. Those contain several rare earths and the glass is heavily leaded to prevent radioactivity from escaping.The glass could be remelted to glass case radioactive waste,as is being done with new materials.

The interesting part about rare earth metals is they are chemically similar in reactions so they can be separated from other elements, and then separated from each other.

In school these were the ones I was most interested in.

Very good film. People thinking about the future. It might catch on.

At the end the guy is acting like it is a problem to have Thorium in solution after separating rare earths. Certainly it would be an issue if the solution was then dumped into the river but why not just extract the thorium from solution for use as a nuclear fuel. It sounds to me like pairing thorium mining with rare earth mining is the way to go. After all Thorium is the safer nuclear fuel because weapons can not be made from Thorium but reactor fuels can. k

Very good documentary, I completely agree, recycling must be the wave of the near future, for the sake of creating a sustainable earth..i one commented that old dumping sites will become a treasure trove for resources...

Wow going to save the planet .... Your my Hero!

Representing Iowa 🌽 🌱 🌽 So very cool to see the people in the beautiful State of Iowa on the leading edge of STEM. 🙌

Cerium oxide is often used as a polishing compound Very commonly used to polish glass or gemstones

I did not know about this rare hearth materials but I know this Today silver is invaluable to solder and brazing alloys, batteries, dentistry, glass coatings, LED chips, medicine, nuclear reactors, photography, photovoltaic (or solar) energy, RFID chips (for tracking parcels or shipments worldwide), semiconductors, touch screens, water purification, wood preservatives and many more things. That is why you should own some!!

This is a good non bias documentary.

Take a drink every time he says "rare earths"

12:40 nice "corn" field

There are plenty of these materials available in thorium laden mining tailings. We should use the thorium and the rare earth metals.

Very well done video

They started their own rock group. Rare Earth makes great music 🎶

We all have got what we need for our life style. Stop and go no further. No more mining. Turn All material need into a close circuit. Enjoy your gadgets to the end and then recycled all the constituent materials for the next round of gadgets for subsequent consumption. Recycling will be a new respectable profession. And worker a decent living wage. When the supply and demand in close circuit. the faster the recycling Go the more plentiful the supply. People choice remain intact. Thanks for changing the conversation. Keep up with the good work. From Hker worldwide

"like for example, rare earths."

Canada's oil sands are rich in rare earths, especially lithium. It's just sitting there in massive tailings ponds.

Right on!

Great Doco ! Thanks for sharing it ! Japan mandated all it's Air Conditioners have Dysprosium/Neodymium magnets inside them back in 2000. Oooops.

I remember reading about magnesium nodules on the ocean floor fifty years ago in a children’s encyclopaedia.

Hello very nice one this is a futures

It is good to know that Tesla doesn't use rare earth in its manufacturing. By the way it is not a small company as you said.

Now that I'm seeing just how much effort and energy it takes to produce the elements needed for solar, I'm more convinced solar power is a lie.

Fact-based , seemingly somewhat non-biased, just technical enough to spark a thought .....these are the qualities that make this documentary great. I wish we had more of these today , hope for more in the future as the times change .

Interesting we also have rare earth deposits in Malawi

German scientists are always pioneers on this field hope your discoveries will benefit not only science but mankind

A 5 megawatt wind turbine contains 800 kilograms of neodymium and 200 kilograms of dysprosium, or ton of rare earth each. The latest turbines need up to 4 tons of rare earth metals each. Giant wind turbine blades are made with 7,000 lbs of epoxy glue and fiberglass. You can see them made on Discovery UK on YT.

I notice that at 40:48, while he is talking about wind turbines, the graphic shows a steam turbine assembly. They should be able to find a graphic of a permanent magnet generator rotor, which would be correct.

Rare Earth also had A couple of great songs has anyone thought of reporposeing old rare earth albums?

I have a manganese nodule from the deepest part of the ocean in my collection it took 27 hrs to reach the surface after it was collected by the explorer vessel

I wonder how many tons of rare earths are thrown away in the form of people throwing away their broken earphones?

Mountain pass reopened at some point because my ex husband worked there in 2011-213 with Bodell Construction building turbine engines on site and had to wear Radon alert patches for the radioactive possibility.....he became deathly ill for two months primarily in his respiratory system. But doctors never did find the cause, he eventually had to find new work because of it....and get this,. The safety inspector had to quit after he developed Guillain-Barre syndrome from a routine flu shot and lost his ability to walk!!

A very interesting video

This was all very interesting, educational and enlightening, on a different note, concerning, earths gravity, and magnetism, It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that earths gravity and these rare mineral within earth mental, in conjunction with earths rotation and poles, is how gravity is created, we could be playing with forces that are essential for life on this planet, we don’t yet fully understand, just as CO2 is acting like a blanket, trapping heat, that our oceans are absorbing, like a sponge which speed upon the melting of the Arctic, Antarctic, which, in my opinion, may affect earth magnetism…just. A Thought !!

These natural elements in these products can't really be destroyed.....recycling is certainly the most feasible option.

And one of my favorite albumns growing up , rare earth , "get ready"

Learn something new. Never learned this in chemistry class so long ago

Fascinating

Australia has more Lithium deposits than every other country that mines it, combined. We also have large deposits of Lanthanum.

Ransacking the ocean is no worse than what we do on dry land. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't scenario.

A huge open pit mine in germany isn't an option? Have you been to Koln - never saw the coal mine there? One of the largest open pit mines on earth?

I love the intro, with reference to "The War of Worlds”. :-D

Like the mass of one in Wisconsin. The one no one has open up but they know it is there because they tested. 15 miles wide 45 miles long.

How ironic the US built the Hughes Glomar Explorer in the 1970s under the cover story of harvesting minerals from the Pacific floor when in fact they were harvesting a Soviet sub (in which some nodules were found embedded in the hull). Good thing the US finally sold the Explorer off a decade ago.

Southwest Colorado is *HUGE* for uranium and other radioactive elements. I have some uranium ore in my yard I've picked up off the ground. It's all over the place.

Known REE deposits are few in number for now but in time new & important discoveries will undoubtedly arise. It's also plain to see there's huge pollution problems associated with REE mining which will become a massive worldwide environmental issue in decades to come.

So from this documentary we learn that there's a pretty girl in every lab.

Pretty sure there's a bunch of it outback here in Australia 👍

To save the Earth, you must sometimes destroy it "partially" 😅😅, It's a vicious cycle, perhaps it's the lesser of two evil.

I liked the way he referred to Tesla as a small American electric sport car manufacturer. So now four years later they are building multi-billion dollar manufacturing plants in many different countries. Nine years ago their stock was selling for $20 dollars per share, and they hadn't built a single vehicle.

Maybe we need to rethink our way of life.

If I was wealthy I would be buying up old landfill sites as an investment. In a couple of decades we will probably be exploiting the waste thorium from the old rare earth extraction! Much of today's waste may well prove to be tomorrow's valuable resources.

Did you ever feel like your computer was hacked and moving by it self all over the screen

Only about 27% if wind turbines (by capacity) use a signifigent amount of rare earth metals. Rare earth metals are used because Neodymium can be used to make very powerful fixed magnets, and generators that use fixed magnets, rather than electromagnets can be designed to be efficient at lower rotational speeds. Since large wind turbines generate a lot of torque but rotate relatively slowly, using a generator that is efficient at low speeds allows the engineers to avoid using transmissions. Transmissions used to require a lot of maintenance. But most wind turbine designs do not go this route, and many of the large wind turbine manufactures have become more comfortable designing low maintenance transmissions and are moving away from using Neodymium magnets. The story is similar with electric cars. (Although I know less about them) Not all electric cars require rare earth metals. Their use is a design choice and alternative designs exist. If rare earth metals become too expensive, or pressure is put on the manufactures to use cleaner solutions, the manufactures have designs they can switch to.

Why explore the deeps of the pacific ocean instead of processing the tailings of our already excavated mines like china did?

The most rich source of minerals comes from the ash from garbage incineators. I would love to see more waste recovery going on. Mining is fine but there is no need to take more then we need

Howard Hughes was mining the modules with the Glomar Explorer. But they found a Russian Submarine on the sea floor instead.

I think they should be looking for rare earth metals in the southern part of the Gulf where the asteroid hit many years ago

So let me get this straight the more green we go the more damage we need to do to Mother Earth how does this make any sense.