Underwater Rare-Earths Mining Economically Unviable, CFR Says

Underwater mining for rare earths, used in hybrid cars and plasma televisions, is economically and possibly environmentally unviable, an academic from the independent think-tank Council on Foreign Relations said.

“To get these minerals out of the ocean in the foreseeable future and to be economically viable is still a long, long way off,” David Abraham, an international affairs fellow at the New York-based CFR, said in a telephone interview from Xi’an, China, for Bloomberg Television today.