I was  scanning back   to determine my nostalgic posting to focus on today, and saw:  WILL RARE EARTHS BECOME A PRODUCT OF THE BLUE REVOLUTION ?  I mentioned I had two previous experiences with this subject:   In the 1970's the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where I worked was trying to accomplish fusion using Neodymium YAG lasers.  YAG stands for Yttrium, Aluminum and Garnet, which is a silicate mineral mostly used as gemstones and abrasives.    Neodymium and Yttrium are rare earths. I then went on to work for the U.S. Senate and my first task in 1979 was to staff the effort of the  Deep Seabed Hard Minerals Act , whose chief sponsor was Senator Spark Matsunaga when the bill passed.  While deep ocean manganese nodules were then of particular attraction, turns out that among the wide variety of minerals found in these deposits, rare earths more recently have turned out to be the most important with  concentrations as hi...

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