California Rare-Earth Mine Reopens 244
burnin1965 writes in to let us know that the looming crisis in rare-earth materials (which we have discussed recently) has prompted Molycorp, the erstwhile operator of a California mine closed in 2002, to announce plans to reopen it.
"With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing Molycorp now has the needed incentive to reopen the California Mountain Pass mine. They will spend the capital needed to implement badly needed updates to environmental controls that will mitigate the radioactive waste water releases that plagued the mine in the past. Chinese imports in the 90s nearly halved ore prices and the California mine experienced multiple failures in environmental controls that resulted in the release of huge volumes of radioactive waste water. Updating the mine to address the environmental issues was not financially viable due to the cheap Chinese imports so it was closed in 2002." Within two years the mine could be producing 20% of the amount of rare earths we import from China.
Re:No! Totally wrong approach (Score:3, Informative)
Rare earth materials are actually quite common, despite their name. Some of them are actually more common than lead or nitrogen.
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
The Molycorp restart has been known for months. The IPO was back in July.
"Rare earths" aren't really that rare. There are many potential mining sites worldwide. They're sparse, in that huge amounts of rock have to be processed to get small amounts of metal. Because of that, rare earth mines produce vast amounts of useless tailings, contaminated with the chemicals used in extraction. That's why nobody wants one nearby. The big one in Inner Mongolia is considered an environmental disaster area even by Chinese standards [dailymail.co.uk].
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good! (Score:4, Informative)
The Mountain Pass rare earth mine [wikipedia.org] uses froth floatation [wikipedia.org], a water intensive process. For goodness sake get some facts right. Even in the high desert, we have these things known as "pipes."
The summary is way off. (Score:5, Informative)
The article says the mine will produce about 20% of China's current output, not 20% of the amount we import.
Digging rare earths from the ground is easy part (Score:5, Informative)
The hard one is separating them. And they are hard to separate because of very similiar chemical properties. Currently there is problably no functional rare earths separation facility outside of China and rare earths concentrate (mine output) has to be brought back to China and thus becomes subject of China export quotas. There is one facility in construction (in Malasia as far as I remember) but going to production will take a while. Chinese have driven everyone out of business and then bought remaining facilities and know-how. And no one in intervened - utter stupidity and incompetence of western leadership has surpassed levels of lack-of-self-preservation-instinct in this matter. We are totally dependent on Chinese and this year we learned about this the hard way. Chineese limited their export quotas by 70% and rare earths prices jumped several times. Of course, you can buy them cheaper for producing your widgets, you just need to move your production facility to China.
I just hope we get full rare earth production chain up and working as soon as possible, but it will propably take a few years.