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/

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

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.

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.

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-...

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...

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.

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.

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.