no substitutes for ree?, page-3

Hi jantimot, you write:

"Uses for REEs won’t disappear, but they are already diminishing in ways which weren’t imagined only seven years ago by most of us. To consider that substitutes can never be found is very rash, imo. Anybody still got shares in carburetor companies?"

With all due respect, you seem to hold the philosophy that this Rare Earth thing is just a fad…

Last week I attended a conference at the Colorado School of Mines which is arguably one of the most progressive and leading educational institutions for new RE engineers who's task in life is to develop new ideas and uses for RE's. They are discussing many new ideas such as the Chinese utilizing RE in cold rail steel to use as an alloy that will essentially "tie up" impurities in structural steel. Also another use of RE's is coating structural steel to drastically reduce corrosion. And since we are on the subject of railroads, Rare Earths are currently being considered in the Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) technology that is the basis of high speed "bullet trains".

Then you have the chemical applications such as a catalyst for hydrocarbon cracking, and emerging (and existing) applications such as the doping of fiber optics with Erbium, a RE that essentially amplifies the light signal transmitted in single mode laser based fiber optic cables.

The list goes on and on and is growing exponentially. Sure end users are finding substitutes for RE's but the main reason driving this progression is the lack of supply and stability to the end user. When there is a consistent supply of RE's at a consistent price I am very certain the number of applications for EACH element individually will grow exponentially as will the amount of material used in each application. Potentially we could see a growth rate that will rival the growth of semiconductors back in the 1970's.

One of my favorite story's is the one that has the IBM engineers standing around Intel's newly invented hand calculator that was powered by the first microprocessor (Intel 40040)... A couple of the engineers commented that it sure was a cute device but they assured Intel that they would never sell enough calculators to recoup their investment in the microprocessor...

I guess I don't have any shares in a carburetor company, but I do own some Intel...