Rare earth metals... given the nation's history with rare earths. In the jungled interior of the country, a mine owned by Mitsubishi had a major spill in 1992. In the years since, nearby villagers have seen high rates of birth defects and eight cases of leukemia. And Mitsubishi is still dealing with the mess: The New York Times recently called it "the largest radiation cleanup yet in the rare earth industry."
This creates a real dilemma: What good is green technology if it's based on minerals whose extraction is so, well, ungreen? Most of the experts that I talked to agreed that the elements are just too useful to give up on. "We need this stuff," says Jim Kuipers, an independent mining consultant in Montana. "It's just a matter of figuring out how to do it right, and unfortunately, the mining industry doesn't have a strong history of doing this... Read on at: http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/10/rare-earths-prius-molycorp
