S2 E76: Rethinking Rare Earth Separation — Chloe Tolbert, Idaho National Laboratory
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S2 E76: Rethinking Rare Earth Separation — Chloe Tolbert, Idaho National Laboratory
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China's conventional rare earth separation process relies on solvent extraction — a technique requiring hundreds of passes, toxic organic solvents, and decades of know-how that China has spent generations perfecting. A team at Idaho National Laboratory has a different approach.
Chloe Tolbert, a researcher at INL specializing in electrophoretic separations, joins hosts Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor to explain how ligand-assisted electrophoresis separates all 14 lanthanides in a single 10-minute pass using nothing more exotic than citric acid and an electric field. No organic solvents required.
They cover the scale-up pathway from nanogram to kilogram-per-day, INL's new 55,000 sq ft Critical Materials and Energy Systems Innovation Center, and why heavy rare earths like terbium and dysprosium are especially hard to separate — and why it matters for EV and wind turbine magnets.
Chloe's closing message: "We can't keep focusing on incremental improvements to legacy technologies. It's all hands on deck."