[Rockhounds] A Once-Shuttered California Mine Is Trying to Transform the Rare-Earth Industry

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits
the only large-scale rare-earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere.
Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 600-foot pit in the ground,
crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are
essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and
electric vehicles, or EVs.

Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths
are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But
MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70-year-old Mountain
Pass mine in 2017, hopes to change that. This quarter, MP Materials plans
to begin separating rare earths at Mountain Pass — the first time this key
processing step will have occurred in the United States since 2015.

MP Materials says that the new U.S.-based rare-earth supply chain it is
building will be greener than its counterparts in Asia, where the mining
and processing of rare earths have created nightmarish pollution
<https://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks>
 problems
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Some of its domestically processed rare earths will be used to make alloys
and magnets for EVs, and others could help renewables developers build the
wind turbines the U.S. desperately needs to decarbonize its power sector.
MP Materials’ rare earths could also get used in everything from
smartphones to military weapons like drones and missiles.

Julie Klinger, a geographer at the University of Delaware who studies the
global rare-earth industry, said MP Materials’ new processing capabilities
have the potential to be a “best-case scenario in terms of diversifying the
global supply chain and also doing so in a comparably robust regulatory
environment.”

https://gizmodo.com/revived-california-mine-seeks-transform-rare-earth-indu-1850561240