Yttrium is almost always found in rare-earth minerals; it is also found in uranium ores, monazite sand, and bastnasite. Yttrium isolation for commercial purposes is usually extracted from monazite and bastnasite. Monazite is a phosphate which contains rare earth metals in addition to yttrium; bastnasite is a carbonate fluoride mineral which contains small amounts of yttrium.
One isolation procedure reduces yttrium fluoride with metal calcium; this reaction results in pure yttrium and calcium fluoride. Another isolation procedure involves extracting salts of yttrium metal present in ores by reactions involving sulphuric acid, followed by hydrochloric acid, followed by sodium hydroxide. Some of the additional isolation procedures that are used involve solvent extraction and ion exchange chromatography. The isolation of yttrium from its ores is a procedure which involves a number of highly complex steps; due to the complexity of isolating yttrium, the extraction of yttrium is hardly ever produced on a small scale laboratory basis.
