RARE EARTH RATE : STUDENTS CHINA ESSAY

SUFFICE TO BEGIN - that nothing works without rare earth in one form or the other. Nothing here, in the context of rare earth, truly means nothing. The World's progress forward, without rare earth composites, will be totally obliterated.

Chinese mines and refineries produce most of the world's rare earth metals and practically all of a few crucial kinds of rare earths.

This has given China's government near complete control over a critical choke point in  global trade.

But for decades in northern China, toxic sludge from rare earth processing has been dumped into a large artificial lake.

In south-central China, rare earth mines have poisoned dozens of once green valleys and left hillsides stripped to barren red clay.

Achieving dominance in rare earths came with a heavy cost for China, which largely tolerated severe environmental damage for many years.

The industrialized world, by contrast, had tighter regulations and stopped accepting even limited environmental harm from the industry as far back as the 1990s, when rare earth mines and processing centers closed elsewhere.

In China, the worst damage occurred in and around Baotou, a flat, industrial city of two million people in China's Inner Mongolia, on the southern edge of the Gobi Desert. 

Baotou calls itself the world capital of the rare earth industry, but the city and its people bear the scars from decades of poorly regulated rare earths production. 

WISE as they are - China's leaders have been working for over a decade to clean up the country's '' Rare Earth Industry '' at a cost running into the billions of dollars.

'' Excessive rare earth mining has resulted in landslides, clogged rivers, environmental pollution emergencies and even major accidents and disasters, causing great damage to people's safety and health and the ecological environment,'' China's cabinet wrote in 2012 a comprehensive report on the industry's policies.

During a visit I made in 2010 to the Baotou tailings lake, a berm, little more than a high pile of earth, lay around its perimeter to contain the sludge.

Rare earth refineries, then along the north side of the lake, were crude facilities with workers stirring big vats by hand. A nearby residential community had high rates of pollution-related health problems, according to Chinese experts at the time.

Baotou itself was shrouded with smog, and the air had an acrid, faintly metallic taste.

Some progress since then is visible. During a return visit in early June, it was clear that the berm had been reinforced with stones. And outside the berm was a concrete-walled moat that could catch leaks from the berm.

Dust from the lake is a more difficult problem to resolve. In processing rare earths, and is used to pry apart the chemical envelope that contains them in nature.

Faintly radioactive thorium is almost always released. In Baotou, it was simply dumped into the lake for decades instead of being stored in repositories, as required in the West.

This Important Master Essay Publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks Keith Bradsher.