West Mojave Plan FEIR/S - Desert Managers Group

A third item, yttrium (on the USBM list but not the NDS list) occurs as undevelopedresources in the southern part of the planning area. Similar to the “rare earth” elements, yttriumis found in the mineral xenotime in Music Valley at the edge of the Pinto Mountains in RiversideCounty. In 1998 Draco Exploration identified 330,000 short tons of resources containing over700,000 pounds of Yttrium oxide and nearly 1.2 million pounds of additional rare-earth oxides(Moyle & Cather, 1992, p. 57). The United States imports 100 percent of its yttrium, with mostcoming from China. There are no satisfactory substitutes for yttrium regarding its use inelectronics, lasers and phosphors in color television and computer monitors (Hedrick, 2002, p.186-187).Although celestite (along with kyanite, mica and talc), has been determined to be “neitherstrategic nor critical” in the Stockpile Report to Congress for fiscal year 2001 (DOD, p. 55),celestite (an ore of strontium) has been on the stockpile inventory in years past. About 100 acresin the planning area have high potential for the occurrence of strontium resources, and severalthousand tons of celestite were mined during both world wars from the southern edge of theCady Mountains. By far the largest deposits of strontium minerals in California occur in thefoothills of the Cady Mountains (Ver Planck, 1957, p. 607). Strontium is used for ceramics,ceramic magnets, and glass, particularly television plate glass because of its ability to block X-rays. It also produces the red flame in pyrotechnics, including ammunition tracers and flares.The United States import reliance on strontium is 100 percent.A 1992 study by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the occurrence of the criticalmetals lead, silver and zinc in the planning area. The report included a figure showing theprobability distributions for each metal in all of the undiscovered deposits that were evaluated.Figures in metric tons were plotted against probability of occurrence ranging from zero to one.At a probability of 0.5, the estimated number of metric tons in the study area was predicted to be200 tonnes of lead, 300 tonnes of silver and 7 tonnes of zinc (Tosdal, et al., Dec. 1992, p. 78).Silver is often produced as a byproduct from gold mining. Gold is being mined at Randsburgand has been recently mined in the Mojave gold mining district.3.4.3.3 Identified Resources by CommodityWithin the planning area there are approximately 426,000 acres having moderate to highpotential for the occurrence and accumulation of metallic mineral resources, 126,000 acreshaving potential for the occurrence of industrial minerals, and 47,700 acres having potential forthe occurrence of construction materials. In addition, there are nearly 13,000 acres havingmoderate to high potential for the accumulation of sodium and potassium minerals. There areapproximately 119,000 acres classified as Known Geothermal Resource Areas and 480,000 acresclassified as prospectively valuable for geothermal resources (BLM Manual 3031). Within theplan area there are about ten active mines in critical habitat for the desert tortoise.There are twelve sites near Barstow in San Bernardino County with important resourcesamounting to 16 million tons (Almquist, et al., 1993, p. 4) for landscaping rock (10 crushed stone& two flagstone): black granite, pink granite, beige, Afton green rock (3 quarries), mint green,pink volcanic rock, dusty rose and wine. Flagstone is mined from two sites in the RandMountains. These figures do not include the brown or “gold” colored rock east of BarstowChapter 3 3-227