The current bottleneck is separation, not mining. There are at least ten startups claiming new separation technologies. They're flaky. A few:
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.
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.
They're still at bench scale. Is the technology good enough for someone to throw money at scaling it? At bench scale, you don't know how much it's going to cost.
There are a lot of people at bench scale separation. None of the startups seem to be at small, profitable plant. That's when you can get serious investors.
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.
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.
I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.
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.
Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.
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.
Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.
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.
> that the "top level" had a plan here
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.
What evidence could you possibly have for that? Plenty of capitalist businesses have been around a long time and engage in long term planning and investment.
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).
This is all a function of the dollar as a reserve currency. The US is optimized to be the place to own things. The rest of the world is where people make things.
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.
Look what is happening to the attempts to build AI data centers. The only thing democrats and republicans can agree on is that building AI data centers should be stopped.
I think much of the opposition to data centers is because companies are rushing to build them as quickly as possible. When you are building a traditional factory, you probably expect it to remain operational for 30+ years, so it makes sense to get the local community on board first. But a data center building could be obsolete in 10–20 years, if the requirements change enough that it's not feasible to retrofit it for new hardware.
Yes, if the company that wants to build the factories became known for operating it on the most polluting way possible¹, you can bet nobody would let it open either.
1 - Way more polluting than anybody even considered possible before.
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 whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
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.
The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.
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 sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.
Obviously if you know someone with rare earth mines who will mine it for pennies compared to what you can you buy from them. I am not aware of any hidden story here. Yes rare earths are everywhere, yes it sucks separating them, yes China does it cheaper and we shut ours down and sold them off.
When someone says "Didnt lose its...", A mine that is shutdown is a loss, because its no longer financially viable to operate. So are we debating what "lose" means?
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.
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)
The rare-earth export restrictions have little if anything to do with Xi or with whether China evolves towards more freedom or more autocracy.
The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.
These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.
In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.
For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.
>...put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react
- 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".
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"
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.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
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.
Having rare-earth minerals is one thing, being able to extract and separate the rare-earth metals from their minerals is a completely different thing.
For now, China has a huge advantage in the facilities for the chemical processing of the rare-earth minerals, so that much of what is mined elsewhere still goes to China for the extraction and separation of the metals.
Some rare-earth metals are very cheap, like cerium and lanthanum. Even neodymium is not expensive. Unfortunately most applications also need at least small quantities of those rare-earth elements that are really rare, i.e. they form a very small fraction of the rare-earth elements contained in a mineral, and whose separation from the abundant rare-earth elements is also very expensive.
So this phrase that is too often repeated "Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests" is actually false for most of the 14 REEs. Not rare are only lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, which cover only a small part of the applications of REEs, like deoxidizers in metallurgy and glass polishing and lighters. Most magnets with neodymium must also include other much less abundant rare-earth metals, to increase their upper limit for the working temperature.
The proposal is unnecessarily complex. The Feds should just start a rare earth company and contract out its operations. That’s how enriched uranium production is handled.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, this would just be efficiency increase in the markets.
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.
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.
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, we wouldn't have let shareholders sell our Rare Earth processing to the Communist Party of China for a quick buck.
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.
A healthy society finds roles for all it's citizens, not just the ones with the right credentials.
I see this a lot, 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.
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.
EU Set to Lift Sanction on Chinese Firm to Save ASML Supplier[1]
> In exchange, the EU would remove trade restrictions it put on an unnamed Chinese firm accused of aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The current bottleneck is separation, not mining. There are at least ten startups claiming new separation technologies. They're flaky. A few:
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
There are others; see [2]. Maybe one of them will get their act together.
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.
[1] http://rareearth.tech/
[2] https://rare-earth-mining.com/top-10-rare-earth-mineral-proc...
[3] https://ucore.com/
Take a look at Maglut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-fvHJAMZf4
They're still at bench scale. Is the technology good enough for someone to throw money at scaling it? At bench scale, you don't know how much it's going to cost.
There are a lot of people at bench scale separation. None of the startups seem to be at small, profitable plant. That's when you can get serious investors.
America didn't lose manufacturing jobs it sold them
The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
U.S. manufacturing output is almost at an all time high. At its peak in 2007, it was only 5% higher than today.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS
We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much.
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.
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.
I’m just not sure if they factored in the rapid technological rise of those adversarial countries like China.
Or maybe it really is the simplest answer that it was all purely in effort to obtain the greatest profit margins…
This is true. During the late Bill Clinton era the arguments for normalizing trade with China were
1) more economic engagement would somehow make China democratic
2) an economically integrated China would be more interested in maintaining international stability
3) WTO membership would force China to follow trade rules
> 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.
Indulging in conspiracy at least allows you to pretend that the "top level" had a plan here.
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.
Lots of people have written about "the cycles of empires".
> It's much more comforting
This kind of psychologizing can be used to subjectively argue either case.
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.
> that the "top level" had a plan here
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.
Sure. But when someone says "designed this way", it really comes off as top-down.
Or corruption.
Capitalist businesses don't work in strategic and long-range terms, they work on quarterly earnings.
Who gives a shit about sovereign capability if you can have a real good earnings report?
What evidence could you possibly have for that? Plenty of capitalist businesses have been around a long time and engage in long term planning and investment.
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).
This is all a function of the dollar as a reserve currency. The US is optimized to be the place to own things. The rest of the world is where people make things.
Addendum: I think this is bad.
Best thread here!
Manufacturing output in US is way higher than 40 years ago.
Manufacturing jobs are killed by automation. Robots replaced people in plants.
This is happening in Europe and Asia too.
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.
Look what is happening to the attempts to build AI data centers. The only thing democrats and republicans can agree on is that building AI data centers should be stopped.
I think much of the opposition to data centers is because companies are rushing to build them as quickly as possible. When you are building a traditional factory, you probably expect it to remain operational for 30+ years, so it makes sense to get the local community on board first. But a data center building could be obsolete in 10–20 years, if the requirements change enough that it's not feasible to retrofit it for new hardware.
It’s so crazy that nobody wants a gigantic, loud, ugly building that raises their power bill and puts them out of a job in their neighborhood
Yes, if the company that wants to build the factories became known for operating it on the most polluting way possible¹, you can bet nobody would let it open either.
1 - Way more polluting than anybody even considered possible before.
Not in all places. However you will see the places where they are stopped in the news.
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 whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US
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.
The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.
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 sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.
Obviously if you know someone with rare earth mines who will mine it for pennies compared to what you can you buy from them. I am not aware of any hidden story here. Yes rare earths are everywhere, yes it sucks separating them, yes China does it cheaper and we shut ours down and sold them off.
When someone says "Didnt lose its...", A mine that is shutdown is a loss, because its no longer financially viable to operate. So are we debating what "lose" means?
Open up any old idled steel plants lately?
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.
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.
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)
The rare-earth export restrictions have little if anything to do with Xi or with whether China evolves towards more freedom or more autocracy.
The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.
These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.
In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.
For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.
>...put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react
- 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: "Away from a dictatorship."
The right direction is accepting Western world domination and not challenging it.
The above account was created 1 minute before posting the above comment
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".
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.
It would simply be a larger more powerful south korea (well not exactly since china actually has resources vs south korea).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases.
Surely there was someone in the 1980s or 90s that saw the demographic writing on the wall and tried to warn everyone and got laughed at.
Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests.
" 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. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element
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.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181016-why-india-wants-...
Having rare-earth minerals is one thing, being able to extract and separate the rare-earth metals from their minerals is a completely different thing.
For now, China has a huge advantage in the facilities for the chemical processing of the rare-earth minerals, so that much of what is mined elsewhere still goes to China for the extraction and separation of the metals.
Some rare-earth metals are very cheap, like cerium and lanthanum. Even neodymium is not expensive. Unfortunately most applications also need at least small quantities of those rare-earth elements that are really rare, i.e. they form a very small fraction of the rare-earth elements contained in a mineral, and whose separation from the abundant rare-earth elements is also very expensive.
So this phrase that is too often repeated "Rare earths are not as rare as the name suggests" is actually false for most of the 14 REEs. Not rare are only lanthanum, cerium and neodymium, which cover only a small part of the applications of REEs, like deoxidizers in metallurgy and glass polishing and lighters. Most magnets with neodymium must also include other much less abundant rare-earth metals, to increase their upper limit for the working temperature.
The proposal is unnecessarily complex. The Feds should just start a rare earth company and contract out its operations. That’s how enriched uranium production is handled.
See also National Helium Reserve, which was also sold:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
It became a bit of a news item a few months ago:
> 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.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/pe/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
Cope never ceases.
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.
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.
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.
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, this would just be efficiency increase in the markets.
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.
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.
In a grown up world with grown ups ruling countries and acting rationally, we wouldn't have let shareholders sell our Rare Earth processing to the Communist Party of China for a quick buck.
Why would the magnet dudes accept that the US gets the high quality jobs and they get to be powerless forever?
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.
A healthy society finds roles for all it's citizens, not just the ones with the right credentials.
I see this a lot, 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.
If you've spent your lifetime voting for all the policy that sent the industrial jobs overseas you have to tell yourself that to sleep at night.
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?
EU Set to Lift Sanction on Chinese Firm to Save ASML Supplier[1]
> In exchange, the EU would remove trade restrictions it put on an unnamed Chinese firm accused of aiding Russia’s war against Ukraine.
> 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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-14/eu-set-to...
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.