What people don't seem to understand is that a great deal of the motivation for using these exotic materials in the first place is to put up "barriers to entry" for potential competitors. If making chips involves knowing about esoteric properties of materials that are hard to source, then once your market is developed it will be harder for others to enter, especially if you can control the sources of human and material resources, and thereby prevent access to them by your competitors. For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo has a great many sources of these materials, but, for some reason, it is disintegrating into chaos as a result of civil war and outbreaks of contagious disease. And where do you get the physics graduates who know about these materials and how they are used?
See this post of mine from a few days ago. Here is Sean P. Dudley talking about the root of this problem. It is the failure on the part of American industry to integrate design and manufacturing processes with wider economic objectives.
This talk was given in May 2016. At 4 mins 15 secs "China has announced that they are going to cut off [exports] of rare earth elements to the United States". So, after three years of having ignored this, ... well, what can I say?
More generally, you need to integrate basic research with technology and economic development. For example, it is surely going to turn out that research into water chemistry on very short timescales will have a great impact on many uses of water as a solvent, and one of those is going to be mineral extraction. But this will probably be only a minor part of the applications which will likely be dominated by biotechnology.
See this post of mine from a few days ago. Here is Sean P. Dudley talking about the root of this problem. It is the failure on the part of American industry to integrate design and manufacturing processes with wider economic objectives.
This talk was given in May 2016. At 4 mins 15 secs "China has announced that they are going to cut off [exports] of rare earth elements to the United States". So, after three years of having ignored this, ... well, what can I say?
More generally, you need to integrate basic research with technology and economic development. For example, it is surely going to turn out that research into water chemistry on very short timescales will have a great impact on many uses of water as a solvent, and one of those is going to be mineral extraction. But this will probably be only a minor part of the applications which will likely be dominated by biotechnology.
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