Recover rare-earth elements on the Big Ideas Lab podcast

Rare-earth elements are the spices of modern technology. You don't use much. A pinch here, a pinch there. But leave them out, and the whole thing falls apart.

“To realize how much of your daily life you actually benefit from having rare-earth elements, they’re in the phosphors in your screens, they're in magnets. They're in your cell phone. They're essential all over the place,” said Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) materials physicist Scott McCall.

On the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab, learn about the many ways LLNL scientists are contributing to a domestic supply chain for rare-earth elements. Listen on Apple or Spotify.

If you pull up an image of the periodic table, you’re greeted with an assortment of familiar elements all grouped together. But at the very bottom, there are two rows floating clearly apart from everything else.

The top row of 15 elements is the lanthanides. Together with yttrium and scandium, which behave very similarly chemically, these make up the rare-earth elements.

The 15 lanthanides are, chemically, almost the same element wearing 15 slightly different coats. The properties chemists normally use to tell elements apart barely change from one rare-earth to the next. So instead of one clean separation, they may have to repeat the process again and again.

The process works. It’s just an inefficient way to separate elements that barely look different from one another. But nature can circumvent many of those steps.

“There's a subset of bacteria that have evolved some pretty sophisticated pathways for mining rare-earth elements from nature for use in their own metabolic function,” said synthetic biologist Dan Park. “They actually insert a rare-earth into an enzyme that's important for carbon metabolism. They do this really selectively and are even able to separate some rare-earths from each other in this process.”

Learn more about how LLNL researchers are separating rare-earth elements with bacteria and enhancing other pieces of the critical material supply chain on the Big Ideas Lab. Listen on Apple or Spotify.