The current bottleneck is separation, not mining. There are at least ten startups claiming new separation technologies. They're flaky. A few:<p>- Rare Earth Technologies. [1] PitchBook says they have about $1 million in investment. LinkedIn says they have 7 employees. Their site says they are going to have a pilot plant running in 2025.
Right.<p>- Northern Minerals (Australia) [2] "Progressing the completion of a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) for a commercial-scale mining and processing operation". Australian penny stock, current AU$0.02, way down from peak of 2021. Five years in, and they're still at a feasibility study?<p>- Ucore Rare Metals [3] They got far enough to make some samples at lab scale. They have a demo plant. More real than the two above. But moving too slowly.<p>There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.<p>A big problem with this industry, which the original article should have mentioned, is that there was a rare earth glut in 2015, when China flooded the market. Many of the US players went out of business. Mountain Pass mine shut down. The article's proposed investment vehicle should be stress-tested against the historical data from the last glut to see if it holds up.<p>[1] <a href="http://rareearth.tech/" rel="nofollow">http://rareearth.tech/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-processing-companies/" rel="nofollow">https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-proc...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://ucore.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ucore.com/</a>
America didn't lose manufacturing jobs it sold them<p>The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
Some analysts, notably Andre Martyanov, describe how the US has lost strategic thinking and long-range planning in the military domain. The loss of the US ability to mine and refine rare earths is a good example of absence of strategic thinking in the supply chain.
I’ve been wondering more and more lately if it was designed this way by whoever made these decisions at the top level to prevent another cold-war standoff situation.<p>By requiring the US to rely on often adversarial countries to supply some of its most crucial military components like rare earth minerals, the US couldn’t really go toe to toe with those countries.<p>I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.<p>Or maybe it really is the simplest answer that it was all purely in effort to obtain the greatest profit margins…
> I’ve been wondering more and more lately if it was designed this way by whoever made these decisions at the top level to prevent another cold-war standoff situation.<p>Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.<p>It's much more comforting to think there was a positive intention for the way things turned out, and not just greed and short-sightedness.<p>Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
> It's much more comforting<p>This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.<p>For example, I could say that it's much more comforting to think that current circumstances are artifacts of greedy fools rather than coordination by malevolent and powerful actors.<p>> that the "top level" had a plan here<p>You're also being somewhat reductive here. Sure, entry-level conspiracies rely on an all-powerful council with top-down authority, but there are more nuanced understandings where they can arrive out of alliances of convenience between rival factions.
Capitalist businesses don't work in strategic and long-range terms, they work on quarterly earnings.<p>Who gives a shit about sovereign capability if you can have a real good earnings report?
The combination of tax policy disincentivizing capital investment, and regulatory policy making physical things hard to do has shifting increasing amounts of investment into finance, software, and services (and away from resource extraction, processing, and manufacturing).
>The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US<p>Because when these plants and facilities come up for reinvestment the rules and laws have inevitably made a piecemeal sell out the only financially viable move.<p>The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.<p>Worse, there was always some degree of unwritten understanding between government and big business. Like if big business built out a factory they would expect to use it for 50-100yr with refreshes every 30 or so. When the government started crapping on that it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral.
Once you make it hard to build something, the incentives to build the thing goes away.
Can you imaging trying to build a factory in California in 2026? Or 2006? The NIMBYs can barely stand building an ice cream store.
Fortunately you can build in other parts of the US. There are a lot of places that would love to have you build in the US. Many of them would not be your first choice of where to live. If you only need 10 employees many small towns would love to have you, but they can't supply much more labor than that. 50 employees there are tiny cities that would love to have you, but not all of them.
The guy who runs SendCutSend has repeatedly said he'd love a CA facility but it wouldn't pencil out without the value-add powder coating, electro plating, painting and other services offered and that intentionally adversarial state policy precludes new facilities that do that so he's not gonna try.
The price signals drove the move away, it's quite simple. Energy, labor, pollution tolerance, legal costs and economies of scale said to go elsewhere.<p>Some said that these price signals only make sense if globalisation lasts forever, but their remarks were dismissed as depressing.
Problem is nobody knows the future. XI didn't come into power until 2012 - until then China was moving slowly in the right direction (that is more open and free), so moves of those things there there seemed to encourage that. However XI has consolidated power and put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react.<p>I have no idea who will move what way in the future so I can only guess what we will regret in 10 years. However I must act on the world as I know it lest things get worse. (what makes things worse is open for debate)
I think that an open and free China would still have many of the same geopolitical incentives that authoritarian China does. It would still prefer to dominate global manufacturing, use its resources and manufacturing capabilities for geopolitical leverage, and militarily dominate the seas and islands in its vicinity. It would still be nationalist. It would still want to reverse the "century of humiliation".<p>Type of government does have an effect on economic and military policy, but being a liberal democracy does not make automatically make a country less interested in pursuing naked self-interest.
>...put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react<p>- What do you mean "the right direction"? Do you mean the "open and free direction" that "Hey you can't have our Nvidia chips but must keep selling us cheap rare earth"?
- And who are "we"? I suggest "we"'d better take care of "ourselves" instead of "react".
A classical liberal society. Freedom of speech, elections... They were not there, but seemed to be moving that way.
That looks like a strawman. Try: "<i>Away</i> from a dictatorship."
The right direction is accepting Western world domination and not challenging it.
I don't think its Xi's doing vs Globalist looking only for signals which confirmed their views and ignored or outrightly rejected everything contrary.
short term profit over long term thinking - because no one in the system is incentivized towards long term thinking. The counter balance should in theory sit within the remit of politics, but even senators can be bought and few are far sighted enough to realize the consequences of incremental deindustrialization.
Long term thinking is pretty bad too tbh when you dig in at what the different schools of thought imagine about the drivers of politics.<p>The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.<p>The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.<p>If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.<p>Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.
Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests.<p>"
The term "rare-earth" is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are found only in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. REEs are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth's crust (cerium being the 25th-most-abundant element at 68 parts per million, more abundant than copper), but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore which is costly and energy intensive.
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element</a><p>What radioactive element is commonly found with rare earths and has to be separated? Thorium, the same stuff that could power future nuclear reactors and is commonly found on beaches in Kerala, India.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-to-turn-its-beaches-into-nuclear-fuel" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-...</a>
See also National Helium Reserve, which was also sold:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve</a><p>It became a bit of a news item a few months ago:<p>> <i>Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.</i><p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE</a><p>* <a href="https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-and-it-affects-more-than-balloons" rel="nofollow">https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...</a><p>* <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-and-it-affects-more/id1056200096?i=1000757668473" rel="nofollow">https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...</a>
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, this would just be efficiency increase in the markets.<p>The US do high qualification job like engineering design, state of the art manufacturing and the such and other countries go to manufacture nuts, bolts and magnets that are mainly low qualification jobs for cheap.<p>But, we don't live in that world and the magnet dudes wanna wield the magnets against us and the high quali jobs dudes somehow wanna go back to making nuts and bolts.
Why would the magnet dudes accept that the US gets the high quality jobs and they get to be powerless forever?
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, <i>we wouldn't have let shareholders sell our Rare Earth processing to the Communist Party of China for a quick buck.</i>
Your so called grown up world sounds like the delusion neo-liberal free market thinking that got the West here in the first place.
its a mistake to think that the US will have any kind of monopoly on 'high qualification' jobs when the social convection engine that labor powered is dead. We are becoming a nation of finance bros, vibe coders, and a growing and permeant underclass of just about everyone else. The rest of the world has caught up after the postwar era and if we want to compete, we need to cut out the cancer that is systemic massive wealth disparity.<p>A healthy society finds roles for all it's citizens, not just the ones with the right credentials.
I see this <i>a lot</i>, people somehow under the belief that high-skill/high-paying jobs will remain here and the low-skill/low-paying jobs stay over there. And then are somehow shocked and surprised when other people also want those high $ jobs. It's just such a tenuous grip on reality.
Cope never ceases.<p>Reminder heavy REE i.e. the strategic stuff that goes into sensors (what modern US MIC is built around) is geologically rare - economically extracted from limited ionic clay deposits, which is much in fact rarer than... making magnets by smashing rocks for light ree.<p>That and the entire HREE economic extraction pipeline is Chinese, who build out the foundation tech over last 30+ years aka capability US/west has ever had. The physical reality = agglomerated Chinese mining cities of millions with vertically integrated industrial chains sustained tertiary mining/engineering pipeline larger than RoW combined.<p>Let's be real this not scale US capable of replicating even if it had ionic clays, and even if US manage to sort out LREE (mountain pass etc)... it still basically built its entire strategic MIC (i.e. sensors) on HREE that only PRC can process at scale. Which is kind of dumb, but here we are. But that's not going away for a long time, i.e. PRC will likely scale EUV to western levels well before US/west can scale HREE to Chinese levels, maybe F35s getting real radars before that.
It's pretty funny the lengths these guys will go to avoid nationalization, though to be honest, China is basically in the right here. USA is being aggressive, China is responding. The authors are resentful that America can't do anything it wants without pushback.
Does that logic apply to Europe too?<p>EU Set to Lift Sanction on Chinese Firm to Save ASML Supplier[1]<p>> In exchange, the EU would remove trade restrictions it put on an unnamed Chinese firm accused of aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine.<p>> Sindlhauser, which relies on Chinese rare earths and critical minerals supplies, is at risk of going out of business in the coming months if China’s sanctions stay in place, according to the people. Targeting an otherwise obscure firm illustrates the lengths China is going to gain detailed knowledge into Europe’s economic pinch points.<p>> People familiar with the case say Sindlhauser is almost exclusively reliant on Chinese rare earths, and the listing caused a supply chain shock for the company that had until now done little work to diversify or minimize its dependence on the Chinese inputs.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/eu-set-to-lift-sanction-on-chinese-firm-to-save-asml-supplier" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/eu-set-to...</a>
Don't take the assumption of Chinese knowledge of pinch points that seriously. ASML is the end user of a production chain spanning 9,000+ companies, it's amazing it hasn't broken from just jet fuel prices.
China is lawful evil. They behave logically. Dutch government can't handle leaders like Trump or Putin. Or when Netanyahu starts ranting about muh Jewish ancestors. We're trying ro run a planet here.