Seabed mining goes back to 1869, Jules Verne, and   20,000 Leagues Under the Sea  ( paperback for $3.95 ).  Then in the 1870's, the British Challenger Expedition explored the world's oceans for polymetallic nodules. Amazingly enough, I was once an authority in deep seabed mining.  I was the staff manager in the U.S. Senate for the  Deep Seabed Mineral Resources Act in 1981 , and attended a variety of Law of the Sea gatherings around the world.  That was more than 40 years ago.  When I was director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute from the mid-80s to 2000, we were with the University of Mississippi the national centers for this topic with funding from the Department of Interior.  I retired almost a quarter century ago, and the field is finally beginning to show some life. But back then, there was one more matter of secret urgency, using this Senate legislation as a post-cover.  A  Russian submarine had sunk close to Hawaii , and our CIA had recovered it.  The Howard Hughes

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 high as 22,000 ppm , making future mining attractive.  In