By Dave Melanson
(Dec. 16, 2015) — When Jim Hower published papers in the late 1990s and early 2000s about rare earth concentrations at Kentucky coal mines, it was almost as a novelty. Hower, a petrologist at the University of Kentucky Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER), thought discovering a high concentration of rare earth elements in coal seams in southern and eastern Kentucky was interesting, no doubt, but he didn't think it would amount to much in terms of research and development.
And then