Ctr+f for "refining", 0 results. Extracting is not the PRC rare earth dominance bottle neck, it's the decades of infra and tech built up for processing. This is

Ctr+f for "refining", 0 results. Extracting is not the PRC rare earth dominance bottle neck, it's the decades of infra and tech built up for processing. This is JP spending 40M on research+trial hoping for some sort of resource "moonshot". The lack of strategic resource land deposite continues to cripple the islands security, but underwater recovery/extraction unlikely to be economically feasible vs land producers. And where is JP going to process without fucking up the enviroment? ~80% of PRC rare earth is refined in relatively sparsely populated parts inner mongolia or sichuan, which are more or less periphery. Which part of JP is going to be sacrificed to turn into Mordor? Maybe Hokkaido? Or are these extracted materials going to be shipped to PRC for refining (like many current short/medium term plans for new AU/US rare earth extraction efforts), thereby negating the point of reducing reliance on PRC.