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"Rare earths are crucial for various defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar system

• grebc 1y ago
  I think it’s a bit like TMSC and bringing back chip manufacturing. Sounds easy in theory till you go to do it. My cursory understanding of why we don’t process this stuff anymore is environmental degradation more so than money. Happy to ship the externalities elsewhere while it cheap and we’re on good/friendly terms.
  • usef- 1y ago
    Yes, though money is still a big part of it. An Australian company (Lynas) developed the capability but was struggling to get investment largely because they couldn't produce them as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could. When Japan was temporarily cut off from rare earths they became an investor (willing to pay more to reduce single-vendor risks), but apparently it was hard to get the US at the time to care enough. At least that's the story that was floating around.
    • hilbert42 1y ago
      "…as cheaply as China's scale/subsidies/etc could." Not an issue if China blockades sales. There are strategic and security issues so governments should also mandate production.
      • cutemonster 1y ago
        ... if they are reasonably bright and are thinking reasonably far ahead, and care about their country
• graeme 1y ago
  They're not rare but you have to process them and basically only China does. No clue as to the share of the equipment that is rare earths but if you need a component you need it. Doesn't matter if it's small or in theory cheap. If it's unavailable you don't have a substitute. This has all been known for over a decade but no one invested in an alternate supply chain.
• rzerowan 1y ago
  RE elemets mining/refining is ~80% China dominated, even US and other producers mined ores go to China for refinement.The concentrations are ridiculous for the process, think several tons to extract some kilos. Then theres the heavy RE and light , with some being produced as byproducts of other refinement/industrial processes where once again the top producer is China , who due to their scale have essentailly commoditized the production. Thats why magnets at cents instead of several dollars or tens of dollars. As for all those EV/consumer and Mil products its not raw RE being utilised but speciality alloys that are worked to produce whatever the material science requires , where once again there one industrial producer. Thats what the whole chain part of supply chain comes in , similar to why its easier and cheaper to manufacture iphones in Schenzen; all the refining/alloys/smelting is in one location with the skilled workforce and advanced methods that have been iterated over the last 30 years. As to what % go into mil products, several kilos of this several of that forged into speciality alloys at commodity prices vs doing it at artisinal mining prices and those billion dollar weapon systems become tens or hundred billion dollar systems.
  • keepamovin 1y ago
    Yes, the mines are not in China, but the refining is. Is it impossible to onshore refining for supply security?
    • baq 1y ago
      It’s possible but it’ll take a decade or two if you start today.
      • jandrewrogers 1y ago
        It only takes a decade or two if there is zero urgency and you give every rando with an axe to grind, both imaginary and real, veto power over the project. The other option is to just build things that need to be built.
        • john_the_writer 1y ago
• pottertheotter 1y ago
  As you said, rare earth elements aren't really rare--they are very abundant. But they are mixed in with themselves (there's 17 of them) and lots of other elements. Think of it like if you had 50 different colored sands and had huge amounts of all of them, then mixed them all up. The rarity is that you're not going to go through that sand and find a big patch of blue sand. There's plenty of them, and all over the world. It's also important to separate the mining of rare earths from the processing/refining. 60% of REEs come from mines in China. But 90% of the processing is done in China (for some of them, heavy REEs, 100% of it is done there). It wasn't always this way, but started to change in the 80s and 90s as Chinese firms were able to process rare earths at much lower costs. It was a mix of things--labor rates, lax standards, as well as state subsidies (the latter shouldn't be overlooked). It's difficult to reopen processors, and starting up new ones requires a lot of time and money. We can do it, we just can't flip a switch and start it up. Also, China has developed a lot of new technology to do it and have export controls on the tech. Also, we have much more severe environmental standards these days that would make it even more difficult to get going.
• hooch 1y ago
  From a companion article: "For instance, an F-35 contains more than 900 pounds of REEs, an Arleigh Burke–class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia-class submarine uses about 9,200 pounds."
  • refurb 1y ago
    That’s just a reporter who hasn’t done their research. Rare earth are used as additives to things like iron and other metals. I’ll bet the reporter saw “9,200 pounds of rare earth alloys” and decided “alloys” is too confusing and dropped it.
• kyawzazaw 1y ago
  it's rare compared to other stuff. plus you have the issue of refinement.
• rapjr9 1y ago
  Rare earths are not rare on Earth, but production of rare earth metals is rare and difficult and almost exclusively done by China. There are two other factors that make this announcement important though. One is the use of the foreign direct product rule, which means China is requiring all use of rare earths produced by China to be tracked and require approval, and all military applications are not going to be approved (why would China arm it's competitors?) The other factor is that while things like F-35's may only use a few hundred pounds of rare earths each and there are not many of them, things like smart bombs and semiconductors need rare earths and there are a LOT of those. If China can truly cut the US from China's production, it's likely going to greatly reduce the US's current attempts to scale up both weapons production and the more advanced semiconductors (like GPU's for AI) until the US can get alternate sources. It will take 5-10 years to build alternate sources (some small pilot projects are near completion, but scaling up will take a while), so during that time the US could be short on weapons and compute power. The US military has done some stock piling of rare earths, but it's a fairly small stockpile. So worst case is no weapons or AI for the US for some time. There will also be consumer effects. EV's, drones, phones, TV's, RC cars, and more all use rare earths or rare earth magnets. Because rare earths were cheap before, most quality electric motors now use them. China can now cut off those uses also if they want to. How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable. The CIA could start a toy manufacturer front company and buy rare earth magnets for example. China may eventually find out and cut them off, but then the CIA can just start a new front company. Buying from European or Asian companies as intermediaries may be difficult to enforce. If a war started over Taiwan, China could just cut off all shipments to the world. So there is perhaps a five year window here where China can exercise power via rare earths. Beyond that alternate sources will likely be in place. So one thing China is "saying" here is that if the US is going to cut China off from advanced computer chips, China is going to make it impossible to make those chips so the US won't have them either. This could be enough to bring a sudden halt to US AI investment. It would definitely introduce a big new uncertainty.
  • LexiMax 1y ago
    > How effectively China can halt sales to the US is debatable. Every intermediary or degree of separation introduced raises the price as each link in the chain demands their slice of the action. They might not be able to stop sales, but I imagine they might make it quite expensive.
• jandrewrogers 1y ago
  The US has an abundance of rare earth and many other metals, substantially more than all but a few other countries. Aggressive and cynical environmental activism that buries mine development in decades of lawsuits has made it financially infeasible to develop domestic resources to the point where even mineral exploration is rarely done in the US anymore. No point in exploring for minerals if you won’t be allowed to mine them. In principle, metal refineries are not that difficult to build and operate. It isn’t rocket science and could be done relatively quickly if the US really wanted to. In practice, any attempt at doing so will be buried in decades of cynical blocking actions by political activists. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out the parties blocking this are substantially albeit indirectly supported by adversarial countries. It is no different than why we can’t build housing. Unless the US adopts an attitude of telling the haters to go pound sand because building things is important to the furtherance of civilization, nothing will happen. We as a culture and society give veto power over damn near everything to far too many people that couldn’t be trusted with authority over a lemonade stand.
  • KPGv2 1y ago
    > Aggressive and cynical environmental activism How is environmental activism cynical? My understanding is that RE mining is terrible for the environment. If I must cause some level of pollution, I don't think it's cynical to want it to happen far from where I am.
    • chii 1y ago
      it's cynical because these activists who do it are using it for fame and clout; they still enjoy the benefits of these environmental destruction (which is simply exported else where, or the costs borne by someone else other than them).
      • LexiMax 1y ago
        What would be your definition of meaningful climate activism against rare earth elements? Or is this one of those "there is no ethical consumption, therefore everyone is a hypocrite and nobody can criticize anyone over anything" type gotchas?
• throwaway-0001 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • stirfish 1y ago
    Are you a bot
    • throwaway-0001 1y ago
      Anything I said was wrong? First commenter was wrong about something, and just raised up. Stick to the topic if you have anything to add id say.
      • stirfish 1y ago
        You're absolutely right. It's not that you're a bot — it's that nobody wants to spend the time engaging with a comment you didn't make the effort to write yourself.
  • CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Please at least edit the AI answer to look like you tried a little bit.
    • throwaway-0001 1y ago
      Edited. But why you so against being AI than making an argument to that? At least the AI is showing up what’s inaccurate and most comments get it wrong.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • LexiMax 1y ago
        The grandparent comment isn't "against AI" - it's against low-effort participation. When you paste raw AI output without even reading it critically, you're essentially saying "I care so little about this discussion that I won't spend 60 seconds engaging with it myself." You ask why we should care whether it's AI-generated. Here's why: unedited AI responses often contain hallucinations, miss context from the thread, and make arguments the poster doesn't actually understand or stand behind. When challenged, can you defend the points "you" made? Do you even know what they are? More fundamentally, forums like HN are built on human discourse - people sharing their knowledge, experience, and perspectives. When you automate your participation, you're taking from the community (reading others' contributions) while giving nothing of yourself back. You're treating other humans as if they exist to process your LLM's output. If a topic matters enough to you to hit "reply," it should matter enough to formulate your own response. If it doesn't, just move on. Nobody benefits from discussions cluttered with unvetted AI text from people who couldn't be bothered to engage. --- Thus spake Claude Sonnet.
• maxglute 1y ago
  >I thought "rare earths" were not rare at all Propaganda. Some strategic rare earth is indeed rare. As in economically extractable stuff are geologically rare. The strategic heavy stuff (dysprosium, terbium, yttrium) for high performing magnets are ECONOMICALLY extracted from ionic clay deposits mostly in PRC, myanmar (controlled by PRC), and small pockets else where (Lynas Australia+Malaysia) which is <10% i.e. not enough for world demand but process still depends on PRC tech. Rare earth is not rare for these HeavyREE in the sense that fresh water is not rare for a desert nation next to the ocean, you just have to spend $$$ desalinate. Except this is 2000s, and the technology to do so at scale doesn't exist. US+co would have to plow through order magnitude more rocks to get the small % of HREE, i.e it's much more energy intensive and polluting to the point where it might not even be strategically viable. See how PRC has MORE shale deposits than US on paper but they still have to import fossil because the shale is technically hard to access. TLDR is PRC controls like ~90% of supply and ~100% of process for some strategic HREEs, i.e. more than US EUV tier control. The only saving grace is HREE doesn't depreciate like semiconductors so if it can be smuggled (like US did with Ti from USSR during coldwar) it would be golden, but you also can't rent HREE from the cloud. So it depends on how strong PRC enforces controls. The other reminder is there is host of other elements that are also strategic (Ga/Ge for radars etc), which PRC also functionally has 100% control over due to having ability to process to sigmas of purity, i.e. imagine if everyone has oil but only one country has refinery technology.
  • tonyhart7 1y ago
    if you cant stop north korea or russia buying things from blackmarket, the no one can stop the US from buying such things US has more resources and allies that can be used as a supplier, its just making things more expensive
    • maxglute 1y ago
      How expensive matters, can stop NK and RU from access/buying in quantities that effects planning. And we're talking about a lot of commodity tier globally diffused/produced components where there are many sources and enforcement is really US weaponing the dollars. Different from PRC having production monopoly over critical input for high temperature magnets that say a F35 or AIM120 component needs but have no alternate supply chains for. It's not COTs stuff like chips from washing machines used for a lowend drone. Just like EUV block, it's really matter of how much buying such things (in quantities required) gets disrupted, i.e. enough to degrade supply chain enough that force US to make expensive / different choices, waste 100s of billions and decades to retool MIC away PRC HREE. PRC has less highend compute for training than it would otherwise have without EUV block, and US can likely have less high-end hulls, airframes, less performent munitions and sensors etc... amount of access ripples across strategic landscape. All current US+co HREE for some strategic elements touch PRC supply chains. And TBH PRC can probably execute export controls much more effectively than US, but these are PRC's first legislated, structured global export controls from PRC. So hard to say how effective it will be, but they may very well be able to stop US+co more than US+co can stop NK or RU. PRC can go full nuclear, functionally 100% some strategic HREE components to be produced in PRC. Like how US wants 50% highend semi produced in CONUS, but with semi, US is only one key chokehold supplier and has to negotiate with multiple parties, PRC can solely control HREE that's concentrated in PRC for short/medium term. Again that translates to US not able to build up platforms&stockpiles in sufficient #s, or spend $100Bs and critically, more time to design around shortage. Next thing you know, short/medium term procurement changes enough entire force / deterence balance breaks.
• silexia 1y ago
  China uses slave labor and extremely toxic environmental damage to build this stuff. Western countries banned that sort of thing. We have to relax our laws or increase tariffs to have a domestic industry.
• tooltalk 1y ago
  > What % of "rare earths" are going into those military products? This is somewhat dated (2012), but I suspect that it hasn't changed much: <5%[1]. 1. Rare Earths Shortage Would Spur Pentagon to Action, Gopal Ratnam, Bloomberg April 9, 2012 https://archive.ph/1aEF8 https://archive.ph/1aEF8