U.S. at risk of rare earths supply disruptions

The United States risks major supply disruptions of rare earth metals used in clean energy products unless it diversifies its sources of the minerals, the Energy Department warns in a report due to be released later on Wednesday.

The United States and other countries are worried that China, which controls 97 percent of the world trade in rare earth metals, will use those supplies as a political weapon and cut back their export when it is in a dispute with another country or to grow China’s clean energy technology sector.

“The availability of a number of these materials is at risk due to their location, vulnerability to supply disruptions and lack of suitable substitutes”, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a report, due to be unveiled on Wednesday at a rare earth metals conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The release of the report coincides with trade talks in Washington between the United States and China. U.S. officials are expected to push Chinese officials to loosen export restraints on rare earth elements.

China, which said on Tuesday it planned to raise export taxes on some rare earth metals beginning next month, holds 37 percent of known rare metal reserves, the United States has 13 percent and the rest is in other countries.

The 17 rare earth metals, with exotic names like lanthanum and europium, form unusually strong lightweight materials and are used in a wide range of applications including high-tech and defense products, car engines and clean energy.

China has vowed that it would not use its dominance of rare earth supplies as a bargaining tool with foreign economies but it has cut its exports of the materials on environmental grounds.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised U.S. concerns over Beijing’s export policy with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi during a visit to Asia at the end of October.

The Energy Department said in its report that it looked at the use of rare earths in wind turbines, electric vehicles, solar cells and energy efficient lighting because these clean technologies are expected to be deployed substantially on a global basis over the next 15 years, increasing demand for rare earth metals. It said that in order to manage the risk of rare earth supply disruptions, the United States must increase its domestic extraction and processing of the materials.

There is only one U.S. rare earths producer, Molycorp Inc. It is the largest non-Chinese rare earths firm and the only rare earth oxide producer in the Western Hemisphere.

The report said the United States must work closely with its international partners, including Europe and Japan, to boost their production of the materials.

“Diversified global supply chains are essential”, the report said.

However, mining rare earth metals can be very expensive and the lead times for new mining operations are long, ranging from two to 10 years.

Exercise 10. Suggest the methods of translation into Ukrainian of the names of English and foreign companies in the sentences below.

1. Ask a middle-aged working man in the north of England what he and his friends contemplated doing when they left school 20 years ago and you get only two answers: They would work in the shipyards or the coal pits, for companies with names like Swan Hunter, British Shipbuilders, Cammell Laird and British Cod. 2. Ask a secondary-school graduate now where he or she is likely to wind up working and you will hear very different-sounding names: companies called Samsung, Daewoo, LG Electronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Woo One, Tatung or maybe Poong Jeon or Sung Kwang. 3. It is a sign of one of the most dramatic changes in modern industrial history: the growing dependence of Britain, a rich country that once ruled a great empire, on South Korea and Taiwan, once poor, developing countries, to solve the chronic problems of unemployment left behind when the coal mines and the shipyards closed.

Exercise 11. Translate the following sentences containing the titles of American news media into Ukrainian.

1. American newspapers get much of their news from two news agencies – AP (Associated Press) and UPI (United Press International). 2. The record for a Sunday paper in the United States is held by The New York Times. One issue on a Sunday in 1965 contained 946 pages, weighed 36 pounds, and cost 50 cents. 3. In 1986 a total of 9,144 newspapers (daily, Sunday, weekly, etc.) appeared in 6.516 towns in the United states. 4. Most of the daily newspapers are published, rain or shine, on Christmas, Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July (Independence Day). 5. Among the twenty newspapers with the largest circulation only two or three regularly feature crime, sex, and scandal. 6. The paper with the largest circulation, The Wall Street Journal, is a very serious newspaper indeed. 7. The Wall Street Journal can be found throughout the country. Yet, one wouldn’t expect The Milwaukee Journal to be read in Boston, or The Boston Globe in Houston. 8. Three of the better- known American newspapers The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times not only collect but also sell news, news features, and photographs to hundreds of other papers in the U.S.and abroad. 9. In one famous example, an expose of the CIA in The New York Times, also appeared in 400 other American newspapers and was picked up or used in some way by hundreds more overseas. 10. ‘Picked up’ is not quite right. Such stories are copyrighted and other newspapers must pay for their use. 11. Some American papers are of international excellence, namely: The Christian Science Monitor, The (Baltimore) Sun, the St. Louis Dispatch, The Milwaukee Journal. 12. In a large international survey of newspaper editors, The New York Times was ranked by most as world’s top daily. 13. Among the largest daily U.S. newspapers (1986) also are: (New York) Daily News, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press, The Chicago Sun Times, (The Long Island) Newsday, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe. 14. There are more than 4,000 monthly, and over 1,300 weekly magazines in the USA.15. Quite a few of them have international editions, are translated into other languages or have ‘daughter editions’ as National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Time, Newsweek, Scientific American, and Psychology Today. 16. Some American periodicals treat serious educational, political, and cultural topics at length. The best-known of these include The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Educational Review, Saturday Review, Consumer Reports, The New Republic, National Review, Foreign Affairs, Smithsonian (published by the Smithonian Institution in Washington, D.C.), and, of course, Family Circle, Woman’s Day, or National Enquirer.

Exercise 12. Translate the following sentences containing the names of well-known international corporations into Ukrainian.

1. Sony Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. will invest 50 billion yen ($412.2 million) in a venture to make liquid-crystal-display panels. 2. Bankers Trust New York Corp. agreed to buy call options on 15 billion yen of Nippon Credit Bank Ltd. stock over the next three years. The options, if exercised, would raise the U.S. company’s equity stake in Nippon Credit to nearly 4 per cent. 3. Japan’s vehicle exports rose 42 per cent in August from a year earlier to 369,659 helped by a combination of a weaker yen and strong demand for sport-utility vehicles. It was the 15th consecutive monthly increase. 4. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. and Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd. plan to extend their newly launched experimental high-speed line to Thailand in November. 5. Matsushita Electric Philippines Corp. will begin increasing the local content of US products because of concerns over the weakness of the Philippines peso. 6. Fletcher Challenge Ltd. of New Zealand’s Canadian subsidiary sold its U.S. paper mill, Blandin Paper Co., to UPM-Kymmene Corp. of Finland for $650 million. 7. Cable and Wireless PLC bought an additional 5.75 percent stake in Asia Satellite Telecommunications Holdings Ltd. from Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. for 458.6 million Hong Kong dollars ($59.3 million).

Exercise 13. Translate the following texts, paying special attention to rendering proper names.

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