The world has been vigorously discussing the 3 years of war in Ukraine and suddenly, unexpectedly, towards the end, the US authorities started talking about some of the rear-earths minerals that they are going to extract in Ukraine to compensate for their expenses on American military aid for Ukraine.
There is a version that most of today's readers are not able to list the so-called rare earth minerals and have a poor idea of what they are needed for.
The rare earth minerals was opened in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the rapid development of science and industry, and many of them were found to have interesting properties.
So what the hell are rare earth metals?
This is the name given to 17 elements of the periodic table. Of these, 15 belong to the group of so-called lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium.
if we look at open sources on the use of these so-called rare earth metals, we will find that they are used very limitedly.
From what we managed to find in open sources, more or less good demand is for neonym, thanks to which we managed to obtain powerful magnets that can significantly change our lives, since magnets are very widely used.
The rest are used in extremely narrow areas, for example, aerospace manufacturing of some electronic devices and scientific research. More important, their consumption is highly dependent on the decisions of a small number of people.
As their main use is in extremely narrow areas and limited, it is not surprising that most of the population does not know about them.
THhey used for research as their application in aerospace technologies which are also rarely used in reality. Although there are many publications in the media about supposed achievements in them, it allows to manipulate the significance of these rare earth metals. a
The rare earth metals themselves, as it turns out, are not so rare and are spread well over the earth, and their extraction is usually an accompanying process from the waste heaps of other mineral rocks.
That is, in fact, they can be mined almost anywhere. And their cost is very volatile and it is impossible to predict which of them minerals will really be needed in the next 5-10 years and whether they will be needed at all.
The situation is more like Ukraine, which has nothing in resourses, but a large territory in Europe, has nothing else to offer the US, and the US really wants to take something in exchange for the 500 billion in aid they have provided over the past 3 years.
A more interesting situation was written in the press about 10 years ago.
The fact is that the US suddenly became concerned about China occupying the production and consumption of rare earth materials and even imposed a ban on their export, thereby making some important American sectors of the economy vulnerable.
The solution however was found interesting the USA decided to stimulate Vietnam to develop production of rare earth metals Although as Wikipedia information shows this can be done in almost any large country.
However, despite the fact that the US concern about rare earth metals appeared about 10 years ago, according to the data available in the press, the situation has not changed in the main.
China continues to be the world leader in the production and consumption of rare earth metals and the rest is mined in countries that also mine a lot of metals, such as the USA, Australia and Canada.
If we speak literally then in fact much rarer and much more important and useful for the industry metals are not called rare they are called noble.
The only problem is that these noble metals or so-called platinum group metals are concentrated in only two large deposits on the entire globe, one of them is in Russia, Norilsk Nickel, and the other is in Canada.
Well, since Ukraine, as has already been said above, has nothing else in Europe, which is relatively large, then we will have to take what there are rare earth metals, which are found there in small quantities.
Despite the fact that the Americans claim that they helped Ukraine with 500 billion dollars, and the entire market of earth metals for the last year World was only 6 billion dollars.
However, in big politics, few people count the numbers; if it were necessary to help Ukraine with 500 trillion dollars, it would most likely be carried out in the same way as If it were necessary to find incredibly important rare earth metals there that have not yet been found anywhere, they would also most likely be found.