One man's trash is another man's treasure - the war on coal

Looks like the Green's war on coal was poorly thought out - the waste from coal mining is another richly concentrated mine of it's own. From the United States Department of Energy:

High Concentrations of Rare Earth Elements Found in American Coal Basins
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has found high rare earth element (REE) concentrations in coal samples taken from the Illinois, Northern Appalachian, Central Appalachian, Rocky Mountain Coal Basins, and the Pennsylvania Anthracite region. These highly concentrated samples are greater than 300 parts per million (ppm).

“Rare Earth Elements are vital to the development and manufacturing of high-tech devices such as computers, cell phones, and our national defense systems,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “The current difficulties and high expenses associated with REE extraction has left the U.S. dependent on foreign REE imports. Supporting innovative research and development to establish efficient, cost-effective REE extraction methods is critical to our country’s energy and national security.”

Concentrations of rare earths at 300 ppm are integral to the commercial viability of extracting REEs from coal and coal by-products, making NETL’s finding particularly significant in the effort to develop economical domestic supplies of these elements.

Much more at the site - the cool thing is that they are looking at the acid mine runoff and lignite (bad coal) deposits. Both of these are considered to be toxic to the environment but they are rich sources of rare earths and mining these two will remove the toxicity and benefit our technology. Win/Win.

Rare Earths are used for magnets, video displays, MRI instruments for hospitals, aircraft instrumentation, audio and video recording, cameras, the list is huge. Our only source for them has been China because of our own environmentalists blocking any new development. To find that we have abundant sources sitting in what is otherwise a waste stream is pure gravy for the United States.