Asimov's SF, January 2012 (2 page)

About four years ago I did a column for this magazine about our vanishing supplies of certain scarce elements that are essential to the functioning of our technological society. This quote from it will give you the idea:

It isn't just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.

Copper and zinc are well-known elements, but gallium, hafnium, and indium are unfamiliar names, esoteric members of the periodic table. They are used in making the liquid-crystal displays of flat-screen television sets, the control rods for nuclear reactors, and computer chips, and we will be hard pressed to do without them. But there is another group of elements that have even stranger names—the so-called “rare earths,” the fourteen metals that occupy the 58th through 71st rungs in the list of elements, plus three more, elements 21, 39, and 57, that are usually included with them. Praseodymium? Ytterbium? Lutetium? Dysprosium? The names don't run trippingly from the tongue. All of us can name dozens of the 92 natural elements—gold, silver, lead, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and on and on. Uranium! Oxygen! Iron! But—Thulium? Erbium? Promethium? Not exactly household words. And they, too, are essential to our technological society.

They aren't all that rare. Nineteenth-century chemists dubbed them “rare earths” because it was difficult then to extract them in pure form. In fact, the rare earth cerium is the 25th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, less rare on our planet than tin, thulium is as plentiful as gold or silver, and most of the others are reasonably abundant. Only radioactive promethium is truly rare, because it has a half-life of 17.7 years and keeps using itself up. The trouble is that these elements are found only in a few select places on Earth, and extracting them from those places is a messy and environmentally dangerous business; the ores are very closely entangled with the radioactive element thorium, which makes them hard to refine, and because of that geographical fluke and the thorium problem we are facing a critical shortage of them.

China, for example, produces 99 percent of the world's supply of the rare earth dysprosium, which is used in those wiggly looking fluorescent light bulbs that our legislators want to make mandatory, and in the sleek little smartphones that almost everyone carries these days. Rare earths are also used in laser-guided weapons and hybrid-car batteries, portable X-ray machines, welding goggles, self-cleaning ovens, and many another twenty-first-century specialty. China also controls 92 percent of the cerium and lanthanum supply, elements needed in the manufacture of a great many useful devices. The latter two rare earths, and some others, come mainly from an unusual geological formation running across China's southern provinces of Jiangxi and Guandong, the only known deposit of them in the world that is not contaminated with radioactive thorium. These are the “light” rare earths, those with lower atomic numbers. The main supply of dysprosium and others in the group of “heavy” rare earths is found in a desert region near Baotou in northern China.

China maintains tight export controls over these prized substances, thereby keeping their prices high, and sometimes cuts off shipment of them entirely for political reasons, as it did in September 2010, when it banned all rare-earth exports to Japan for two months during a territorial squabble. (And kept close watch over other countries’ reshipment of rare earths to Japan to make sure that the Japanese electronics industry suffered properly from the shortage.) Rare earth ores are also found in South Africa, India, Brazil, even California; China has only a third of the world's ore reserves. But mining the deposits of rare earths in places other than China is complicated by the fact that such mining involves the creation of vast quantities of toxic radioactive waste, and China seems much more willing to incur such environmental damage than, say, the United States. Thus the entire world is dependent on China's whims for its supply of these vital elements.

Of course, when a rare and desirable commodity is kept under government control like this, smuggling is an inevitable consequence, even in a tightly regulated country like China. It's been estimated that close to half the world's supply of heavy rare earths is illegally exported from China, and one seventh of the light rare earths. The Chinese government is, naturally, distressed by this. In the north, at Baotou, it has begun to discourage smuggling by putting up electrified fences around the dysprosium mines. Preventing illegal rare-earth traffic in the southern provinces has been more difficult, because a wild, lawless atmosphere prevails down there and local officials are thought to collude with crime syndicates to carry out illicit strip-mining and refining of the substances. Late in 2010, therefore, the central government announced that it was placing the southern mines under national authority. The ostensible reason was environmental protection—even though radioactive waste is not a significant issue in the south, the pirate miners were ruining the landscape in other ways, flagrantly ripping up hillsides and dumping acid-rich mine taiLings into local streams and rivers—but the chief effect of the takeover was to give the Chinese government absolute control over these valuable mineral deposits. Whereupon China's tight export restrictions on the rare earths became even tighter.

What to do? How to assure a steady flow of rare earths to the factories of the western world?

President Obama took the issue up with President Hu Jintao of China during Hu's visit to Washington in 2010, but was unable to extract any sort of rare-earth trade agreement from him. The administration has also appealed to the World Trade Organization, asserting that China is illegally limiting its rare-earth exports in order to stimulate its sales of green-technology apparatus, in which several rare earths are used. (The WTO prohibits export quotas that are designed to favor the exporting nation's own industries.) Since China claims that its mining of rare earths has to be restricted because it does environmental damage, environmentalists find themselves in an odd conflict on that point: protecting the environment in China brings about a reduction in the supply of equipment used in cleaning up other parts of the world.

Meanwhile everybody is stockpiling rare earths against the day when no more exist to be mined, China included, and that makes current supplies even scarcer. China wants to build a stockpile of one hundred thousand metric tons of various strategically important rare earths. Japan and South Korea are amassing reserves also, and the U.S. is talking about a similar project. This hoarding, by itself, is driving the price of these much-craved elements even higher.

One compensating factor is the current construction in Malaysia by Lycas, a giant Australian mining company, of a huge plant for refining rare-earth ore—the first such facility to be built in almost thirty years. Malaysia has already had a bad experience with rare-earth refining: its last refinery, operated by the Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan, left an enormous radioactive wasteland all around it that has required an immense cleanup program. The new plant will make use of advanced refining technology that Lycas hopes will minimize the local environmental hazards the process entails. Malaysia was so eager for the new refinery that it offered Lycas a twelve-year tax holiday. Perhaps, when it is in production, it will mitigate the current shortages somewhat. And in the United States, a company called Molycorp intends to mine and refine rare earths near Death Valley, where the environment is pretty bleak already. Molycorp knows that it must avoid turning the area into the sort of toxic wasteland that surrounds the Chinese rare-earth facilities, and thinks that it can. Programs are under way, also, to recycle rare earths from defunct electronic gizmos—Japan alone sees hundreds of thousands of tons of these objects as reclaimable.

One way or another, we will manage to come up with the supplies of rare earth that will be needed in the years just ahead, though it may require some political head-butting and even—mark my word—a little relaxation of certain environmental restrictions. But the key phrase here is in the years just ahead. Science fiction has taught us that it's a good idea to look beyond the years just ahead, and what we see, peering down the line into the infinite future, is a continuation of the unending war between scarcity and human ingenuity that has been driving technological progress for thousands of years. We may think of our supply of metals, both the common ones like copper and zinc and the obscure ones like samarium and lutetium, as endlessly available for our needs. They aren't. Already, as I noted at the beginning of this piece, we are seeing the first surprising signs of a shortage of copper and zinc. Samarium, lutetium, and the rest of the rare earths are even more troublesome problems, since the sparseness of supply is complicated by the political and environmental issues that I've outlined above.

Eventually, and I can't tell you how far away “eventually” might be, all of Earth's metals, both the rare ones and the common ones, are going to be very rare indeed, and we will have pushed our recycling efforts to their limits. What will happen then? Will a time come, thirty or fifty years from now, when all the smartphones will have to be tossed on the scrapheap because there's no more dysprosium? Or will some future Steve Jobs spark the development of dysprosium-free phones powered by hydrogen or carbon dioxide? (Breathe into your phone to charge the battery!) Will we get back into space and go prospecting in the asteroid belt for gadolinium, holmium, and promethium? Will we come up with some other miraculous fix that we can't even imagine now?

I don't know. So far, the human race has been pretty good at wiggling out of tight corners like this. But every year there are more of us and less of the natural elements out of which we have constructed our civilization. Something, I suspect, has got to give.

Copyright © 2011 Robert Silverberg

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told ya

My wife claims this is my I-told-you-so column, and, as usual, she's probably right. However, I prefer to think of it as my even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day column. Mine was certainly not the only voice proclaiming the coming of ebooks when I first wrote a column about them way back in 2001. But here's the first paragraph:

"Okay, it's time to get serious about online science fiction. New and reprint sites are popping up like mushrooms after a monsoon. Hardware and software companies are offering new, or at least
improved
, technologies to ease the strain of eyeballing print on screens.” And here's a bit from the end: “Perhaps the most difficult problem e-publishers will face is finding a way to make money selling fiction on the net. Information wants to be free, or so they say. And if it isn't free, any number of netizens are willing to find ways to set it free. Hackers and data pirates have some print publishers scared silly. . . .

"Writers too will face challenges. Will we see a kinder, gentler online publishing industry, one that is less driven by a bestseller mentality? A publisher of ebooks has no need of a warehouse or a distribution system that deals with moving atoms from here to there. She can afford patience with a book, giving it time to find its audience. But then how will ebooks find their audiences? Even if only a fraction of the greatest hits of the science fiction backlist becomes available, it will flood a market that already offers far, far too many choices.” Skeptics scoffed, and they were the vast majority, even among the net's digerati. The astute
Jeff VanderMeer
[
jeffvandermeer.com
] conducted a survey about books in 2003, posing a series of questions to practicing speculative fiction writers.
The Physicality of Books
[
fantasticmetropolis. com/i/books
] appeared online on the wonderful Fantastic Metropolis—which has since become, alas, a ghost site. The survey is somethingof a love letter to a technology whose prime was about to pass; in it many of your favorite writers express their deep feelings for printed books. When asked whether it was
necessary
for such books to exist as physical objects, most asserted that it was, citing the many real failings of ebooks and their delivery systems. They weren't portable and were too hard on the eyes, too fragile, too immaterial, not at all like our dear old paper books!

Even in 2006, true believers were thin on the ground. Here's the opening of my column from then: “Although ebooks have come a long way since we last discussed them in March of 2001, many pundits would cite their perceived lackluster performance in the marketplace as proof that they were just another dot.com fad. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Sales of ebooks rose 27 percent in 2003, to $7.3 million, according to
Publisher's Weekly
.” Later in that column, I advanced what I called “The Two Certainties,” cribbed from my friend Cory Doctorow: “1. More people are reading more words off more screens every day. 2. Fewer people are reading fewer words off fewer pages every day. The consequences of The Two Certainties are profound: at some point the ascending digital line must cross the descending print line. Not
if
, friends, but
when
. The Two Certainties point to a future in which ebooks inevitably dominate paper books."

When, as it turns out, is probably now, or maybe next Thursday at the latest.

kindling

While those of you reading this on an iPadKindleNook are still just a fraction of all
'Mov's
readers, you are an increasingly significant fraction. Which brings us to one problem with assessing the impact of electronic publishing on print publishing: it is hard to know how many of those who take this magazine in its electronic form might otherwise have bought the print version. What is clear, however, is that many of those reading ebook versions of this and other print books and magazines are new readers, or perhaps readers who have been wooed back to reading by the convenience and ubiquity of ebooks. A
2010 Harris Poll
[
harris interactive.com/vault/H1-Harris-Poll-eReaders-2010-09-22.pdf
] found that about 10 percent of Americans owned an ereader and another 10 percent intended to acquire one shortly. Even more interesting to writers and publishers is that owners of ereaders read more and buy more books than the average.