Rare Earth Elements

https://imgur.com/QwKBMvnI'm not sure why rare Earth minerals would be a bottleneck. They aren't rare in the element abundance sense, just uneconomical to extract, which is why they are being extracted in countries where human rights violations are happening all the time.

"rare earth metals" aren't "rare" to the USAThey are "rare" per ton of earth in generalSo it's just that mining them is so labor intensive and so toxic (uranium and other radioactivity) that it is expensive outside of places like China.Automate that with bots or whatnot and maybe we don't have to invade Canada and Greenland and start WW3

Not everyone has lots of rare earths... USA for example has just 1.8 million tonnes, and Europe currently has no significant rare earth mines. Rare earths are everywhere, true, but it is very rare to find them in high enough concentrations to be worth mining.https://investingnews.com/daily

I remember reading something similar with China’s dominance of rare earth elements - the US has plenty of mines but it costs too much to mine them and the entire rest of the supply chain is in China, so there’s not much domestic demand

Nitpick: China doesn't have a monopoly on rare earth metals, they just have the least restrictive policies on mining them, and they won't export the raw materials which forces companies to bring their processing operations into china.The US has plenty of rare earths, they just always come up with thorium, which regulators regard as a nuclear waste that must be disposed of at exorbitant cost to the mine operators.

"Rare" earth metals are actually not that rare.The reason we (in the west) don't mine much is that they are very dirty to refine. We don't want pools of toxic waste left over from refining all over the place but China etc will tolerate those.Given the ore itself is (ironically) quite common, all the mining happens where the refining happens because why would you bother shipping tonnes of ore there when is so common.

Regular reminder that rare earths aren't especially rare, just .. diluted: https://www.intheblack.com/articles/2019/08/01/extracting-tr...

My understanding is that these rare-earths are not actually rare - what's rare is:1. A country that will let you mine them2. Refinery capacityRight now I believe the only refineries are in Australia and China but for obvious reasons the US is quickly trying to figure out how to build on here along with semi conductor fabs.

Rare Earths are deposits of exotic minerals used in nearly every advanced technology today (wind mills to MRI's). California used to produce the entire world supply until China undercut the price. As demand boomed (prices going way up) and China started using them as a trade weapon so companies started looking for sources in more stable countries.

“They require substantial quantities of rare earth metals, however, which are expensive and are mostly mined in just one country – China – which has led to worries over security of supply.“