Together with other research and industrial leaders, last month Karl A. Gschneidner Jr. appeared before the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology to discuss the consequences of China’s impending suspension of exports of rare earth elements used in the manufacture of magnets, batteries, superconductors, and other staples of high technology.
As the dean of rare earth research in the United States, Gschneidner offered the committee a review of rare earth research in America, with an emphasis on the role of the USDOE’s Ames Laboratory. Ames Lab leapt into the vanguard of American rare earth research during the Manhattan Project of the 1940s, Gschneidner noted, and still boasts one of the largest concentrations of specialists doing basic research in rare earths in the United States.
Without a robust research component, Gschneidner argued, American commercial producers and manufacturers will not be able to compete with China’s existing, and Europe’s and Japan’s developing, rare earth industries. “The country now faces a shortage of trained scientists, engineers, and technicians,” he told the committee, “and a lack of innovation in the high tech areas, which are critical to our country’s future energy needs. So it comes down to rebuilding these things.”
And when it comes to rebuilding a research edifice in rare earths, there’s no doubt in Gschneidner’s mind that it doesn’t make sense to pour a new foundation when America already has one in place in Gschneidner and his Ames Lab colleagues—not to mention the broader materials, physics, chemistry, and general scientific and engineering resources Iowa State has to offer.