Rare Earth Restrictions To Raise Hard Drive Cost 254
MojoKid writes "Multiple manufacturers in the IT industry have been keeping a wary eye on China's decision to cut back on rare earth exports and the impact it may have on component prices. There have been reports that suggest we'll see that decision hit the hard drive industry this year, with HDD prices trending upwards an estimated 5-10 percent depending on capacity. Although rare earth magnets are only a small part of a hard drive's total cost, China cut exports last year by 40 percent, which drove pricing for these particular components up an estimated 20-30x. China currently controls 97 percent of the rare earth elements market for popular metals like neodymium, cerium, yttrium and ytterbium."
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:0, Insightful)
No, the market price by itself would support opening or reopening [arstechnica.com] of rare earth mines. What you may need is a waiver from the EPA.
If you totally ignore everything they say and instead of that you consider only their actions... then the purpose of the EPA is easily known.
The purpose is to make damned certain that the USA never becomes self-sufficient and able to benefit from its own natural resources. Want to drill for oil? Too fucking bad, we won't let you. It's okay for wildlife in the Middle East and Canada and South America to be impacted by drilling, but not wildlife in the USA. Let's be hypocritical bastards!
It's okay for China to mine rare earths and sell them to us but not okay for us to get our own from domestic supplies. Again their wildlife is more expendable than ours. Somehow their wild animals don't feel pain like ours do, or something.
It's okay to pay someone else to harm the environment someplace else. But not okay to pay yourself to do it here. That'd be baaaad.
"Hmm... how can we weaken the nation so all those unlucky unfortunate 3rd-world nations can take us down a peg or two to assuage our white guilt that we feel for being successful and not living in unstable political shitholes? I know! I got it! We'll do it in the name of protecting the environment. I mean fuck, who could be against clean air and drinkable water? No one, that's who. It's the next best thing to protecting the children!"
You want a better USA, eliminate, defund, and fire all employees of the EPA and the federal Department of Education. Then establish a $1 billion bounty for the first commercial thorium nuclear reactor that sells electricity on the open market for 3 years. And end the War on Drugs. And quit trying to be the world's police and never use the military for anything other than defending our own borders, preferably from illegal aliens. If you shoot them on sight you will only have to do it a few times for the rest to stop coming here. Then experience an age of prosperity not known since the 1950s.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the exact reverse of what you are claiming will happen.
Everyone else in the world will have tapped out all of their resources and we will be left with ours. We will be left with our Oil and our Rare Earths because the EPA stuck it's nose in. When it matters, WE will be the ones that are self sufficient.
That's what happens when you plan ahead or consider something more than just the moment.
Sure, it's side effect the tree hugger's view of thinking ahead but it works out anyways.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:2, Insightful)
While we can discuss where the line is, not wanting to poison the drinking water is not mamby pamby.
Maybe you should look into the condition of drinking water down stream prior to 1970.
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:5, Insightful)
actually, you're 100% wrong.
The restrictions are to try to get high tech industry to develop in China. There are no restrictions of use of rare earth metals in China, just the export of the raw materials. It's a good way to ensure high tech manufacturing does develop. Essentially China can hold the world to ransom due their highly developed and underpaid RE mining industry. It's much cheaper to refine RE minerals in China due to lack of industrial relations and environmental laws.
Hell, even Australian RE companies are hesitant to set up refining here due to the massive amounts of radioactive waste from refining RE minerals.
China are even buying up large stakes in Australian RE mining companies just to gain even more of an edge. Chinalco attempted to take over Australia's largest RE miner and was blocked by the ACCC in no small part due to China's stance on RE exports.
Maybe look a bit deeper rather than just looking at company profits. China are all about bringing jobs onshore and having the upper hand globally.
Aside from this, very happy I bought 4x 2GB HDDs recently for my new array, in before the price rise!
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)
!! sarcasm alert !!
Read it again. I don't think China is doing anyone a favor by trashing their environment for short term profit. The balance between environmental regulation and economic opportunity is a difficult one to maintain, but I for one, am happy to pay a bit more for clean water and happy critters.
My point is that with some forethought and planning, it appears possible to increase the US rare earth mining with acceptable environmental damage by centralizing the secondary refinement process so it can be closely controlled and monitored and perhaps reap some benefits of scale. There was an interesting report on this somewhere, can't recall where I found it and Google and my brain aren't working together as a team this afternoon....
In general, China's current approach to trashing the environment on a huge scale is going to come back and bite them in the ass within a generation. Inscrutable long term planning, indeed.
Re:The obvious first question... (Score:4, Insightful)
Point is that we don't know /when/ SSDs are going to reach that magical point, but it'll certainly be after we see the effects of China tightening up the rare-earth supply.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The Chinese people are firewood.
All people are "firewood" to their governments. No exceptions.
Re:Yet another obvious solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless something happens like happened to aluminum. At one point it was one of, if not the, most difficult metals to refine, and was worth more than gold or in some cases platinum. Then over the span of about a year, a couple people developed a new method of refining it [wikipedia.org]. The price crashed to where, while still more expensive than other metals, is so cheap that we throw away cans and foil made out of it.
If there's a fusion breakthrough, oil prices will crash within a year or two. Rare earths are actually not that rare, they just take a lot of work to refine. If some new, cheaper method of refining them is invented, any vast reserves of them that we are hoarding could become worthless overnight.
Pass environmental laws because you want to protect the environment. Not because you want to gamble that a material will become rarer and more desirable in the future, under the guise of "planning ahead". If you really think the gamble is worth it, then be forthcoming and advocate planning ahead and conserving those supplies for exactly that reason (e.g. helium). Don't try to spin it as justification for environmental laws or vice versa.