it's happening...., page-15

Talking about engineering. I do not know anything about chemical engineering but I have a PhD in electrical engineering and when I hear people suggesting that it is feasible to find alternatives to RE magnets I laugh. There is no replacement to RE magnets and there will NEVER be one. The reason is simply the natural susceptibility of RE elements such as Neodymium or Holmium to magnetic fields. In the past, people were using Ferrous materials for magnets but their magnetic susceptibility is few orders of magnitude smaller than RE materials. It means that the magnetic fields created with RE materials could be THOUSAND times stronger. It means that electrical motors or generators are thousand times stronger than electrical motors or generators made of ferrous materials. So all this nonsense about the Japanese working on RE alternatives is a complete BS.