U.S. races to develop alternatives to China's rare earth materials
Source: Washington Post
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT
STILLWATER, Oklahoma — The parking lot outside the low-slung industrial building is mostly empty and the machinery inside is quiet. But sometime next year, if all goes well, this factory will help break China’s chokehold on a critical global market.
USA Rare Earth is part of a belated U.S. bid to re-establish a domestic supply chain for the high-performance magnets used in products such as drones, electric vehicles, smartphones, medical devices and military weapons. The company is racing to establish a production line, hire several dozen skilled specialists and fine-tune its scientific formulas as it prepares to make millions of powerful neodymium, or neo, magnets in early 2026.
The geopolitical stakes are sobering. China dominates the market for a category of minerals known as “rare earths,” which are needed to make the magnets, as well as for the magnets themselves. Beijing exercised that dominance in recent weeks when it starved American automakers of needed supplies, seeking leverage over trade talks with President Donald Trump.
Long after surrendering the market to China, American companies are clawing their way back to relevance. But USA Rare Earth’s embryonic state — it went public in March — and the obstacles that line the company’s path reflect an uncomfortable truth: It will be years before the United States can shake its dependence on its main strategic adversary. And the federal government must be heavily involved to make that change happen.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/22/us-rare-earth-neodymium-magnets-china/
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I did not know that.
Furthermore, they are almost always found as mixtures, usually including other metals, particularly thorium (radioactive). There's not that many places where the concentration of the metal in the ore is worth the cost of the extensive recovery process. Recently, old tailings from iron and titanium mines have been processed by acid leaching to recover some REEs. Thorium tailings should be an even better source, but they aren't all that common either.
ALL of the REEs are more common than any of the platinum group metals, silver, gold, cadmium (used to plate tools), indium (used in touchscreens), mercury, or bismuth. But almost all those elements are found in concentrated ore deposits, or can be recovered as a byproduct of processing other metals on a large scale, such as zinc and copper, where the flue dust, electrorefining sludge, etc. are effectively "ores" of elements not found in rich deposits, such as germanium, gallium, indium, selenium and tellurium (almost as rare as gold or platinum) -- as well as gold, silver, and platinum group elements.
Unfortunately, mines have often gone after only one or two metals and discarded everything else. Now investigators are going back through their old dumps to see which ones contain other valuable metals. There are tons of coal ash available as well, but I suspect it's [link:file:///Users/SHN/Desktop/fs2015-3037.pdf|so full of silica, alumina, and lime] it's not worth the effort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium#/media/File:Elemental_abundances.svg
(Just to let folks know that all the "easy" solutions have already been considered. 
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