Your Hybrid Car Is Hogging All the Rare Earth Metals

so it turns out that green vehicles aren't that green after all

Meh, wont be long till we get eestore up and running. And hts motors are smaller more efficient and often cheaper to make. All we need is a good way to cool them.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/06/superconductor-electric-vehicle/

comment on the story: duh. Everything comes from somewhere...

Not killing the environment, but definately killing the pocket book. Think of Star Trek (I know you can), gold = worthless (the replicator/dereplicator could refine tons of the stuff with nothing but a transporter and energy). Instead, something else (di-lithium crystals that could not be so refined) was worth much.

While harvesting any element causes some environmental damage, I think the real risk to the environment here is lengthened dependence on fossil fuels when shortages on battery metals put it further out of price scale competition than it already is.

Sometimes you just cant win, as soon as nanotech takes over maybe there will be some relief.

So basically, electric motors use rare metals. Ok then. We need to work on replacing that rare earth metal with something like aluminum. Can we stop singling out hybrids now?

Thought I should add, EVERY CAR HAS AN ELECTRIC MOTOR IN IT. Even non-hybrids.

*******So basically, electric motors use rare metals. Ok then. We need to work on replacing that rare earth metal with something like aluminum. Can we stop singling out hybrids now?**********

****Thought I should add, EVERY CAR HAS AN ELECTRIC MOTOR IN IT. Even non-hybrids.*****

While we are at it, why dont we replace all those structural plastics with adobe?

Rare earth magnets are used in electric car motors to make them small, lightweight and most importantly, efficient. The starter motor in most combustion cars engines does not use rare earth magnets. If the manufacturers of these items could use cheap commonly available materials to do the job, they would already be doing so. Same reason that fuel cells are still so expensive, the materials they are made from are relatively scarce.

Our society is about out of "easy" solutions to the problems of transportation, energy, clean water, food production, etc. Future technologies to address these things will take a lot of r&d money and will not come overnight.

You guys cant read carefully can you? Noone even claimed neodymium is rare. Quite on the contrary, its abundant. Why do you think neodym magnets are dirt cheap??
Read this quote from the article again please :

"Rare earth elements take up 17 slots on the periodic table, and are named not for their overall scarcity (they're actually quite common in trace elements throughout the Earth's core) but for the relatively uncommon minerals in which they were originally found; few rare earth elements exist in pure elemental form naturally."

There are some interesting posts here tho.. Replacing neodymium with aluminum? Ever heard of a permanent magnet made out of aluminum? Or any non-ferromagnetic material? You won't hear of one either.

Cooling superconductors to -200 deg Celsius is more "affordable" and "greener"? Do you happen to have a tree growing dewars full of liquid N2?

Don't buy every little crap about "Greenness" the media is trying to feed you. The author of this article pretty much says nothing, if you carefully reread you will understand what I mean. He is just struggling to get his 5mins of attention. True, isolating neodymium is a rather lengthy procedure.. Guess what, most of the metals that are used on an industrial scale today are similar - aluminum, titanium, even some steel alloys take immense quantities of energy to be produced, releasing some rather toxic gasses at the same time .

But then again, they keep repeating the ice on the polar caps is melting, yet last I read a 30% increase in the area of the ice around Antarctica was recorded..

at least its not producing greenhouse gases