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California Rare-Earth Mine Reopens
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.
Really? You are confused here? What is the difference between concentrating radioactive elements and running hundreds of thousands of gallons of water through them, and having tiny amounts of water percolate through the same elements widely dispersed in their natural state? You need help figuring that out, do you? Take off the blinders and stop apologizing for people who will gladly ruin your entire family's health and take no responsibility for it.
This is basic, people, something we all should have learned no later than preschool: you make a mess, you clean it up.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Despite the story's GO AMERICA slant, a lot of material is going straight to Japan, where most of it is consumed in the first place. Like to Hitachi: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BK5PL20101221
Oh look. They also signed deals with Sumitomo and Mitsubishi: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/T101219002181.htm
They got huge piles of cash from Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi...which is why it's hilarious to hear the CEO of Molycorp waving American flags in various quotes. Oh, and Molycorp's stock has shot up since their IPO in July: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-28/molycorp-s-ipo-aims-at-chinese-grip-on-smart-bombs.html
Also, how interesting that the EPA announces cleanup plan of Molycorp site just a few days ago: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=12460111
The EPA said contaminated material from the Molycorp site includes about 328 million tons of acid-generating waste rock, more than 100 million tons of tailings and acid-rock drainage at the mine and seepage at the tailings facility.
Anyone want to place bets on whether or not the US government will press environmental regulations on Molycorp this time, now that national security interests are involved?
Please help metamoderate.
I think the US should sit on this resource for now. China only has 37% of the world's proven reserves of rare-earth minerals, but they are fulfilling 97% of the world's demand. Let them burn through their easily harvested natural supplies, so a decade from now they will be reliant on other countries for a critical resource. This could provide one of the few checks and balances for dealing with China as a communist super-power.
Better known as 318230.
Progress does not consist of a small group of people enriching themselves at everyone else's expense. Progress consists of better things for everyone, not a trade off where some people must lose in order for others to win.
All I ask is that people pay all the costs they generate, rather than asking others to pay. Why should I burn in hell for asking that people take responsibility for their actions, and how their actions affect others?
I'm all for real progress, but poisoning people, animals, plants and ecosystems in order to extract useful minerals is not progress. When we extract those minerals without harming others, that is progress. Making things better for some by making things worse for others is not progress.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
RE mining has been an environmental problem for a long time. For whatever reason, the RE ores always seem to have a lot of thorium in them also -- there's your radioactive issue, and why we don't just refine and use that too, I'm clueless, as the price of uranium is also doing well (and I own stock in that too that is also doing well). As the Indians know, it's part of a useful fuel cycle as it can be bred into fissile fuel just like U238 can be. The other issue with RE's is that most of them are so chemically similar that they can be real tough to get apart into the individual RE metals. GM and others have done some work on making pretty good magnets with "what you get" rather than what you'd have in a perfect world, slightly reduced performance compared to perfect, but far lower costs at a few stages of the process.
At the instant of this writing, MCP is up 10.2% *in one day* which is about a usual annual return from the stock markets. REMX, an ETF that tracks RE's is only up 0.87%. No guts, no glory. I don't know about the other bucks for sure, but the profits trading on MCP are going to this redneck engineer American to be spent here. I'm sure like any news driven stock, that it will either go back down, or flounder around awhile before going up again. That's why I call myself a trader -- I don't invest, I trade, and know when the heck to get out and put the money back into first bank of mattress....
Copper is doing pretty well these days too, some due to manipulation, but in general we're finding out that Malthus was right, just in the wrong century. Won't be many decades before old landfills become a "mineral rights" issue. We really do live in a finite place.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
That's too narrow. (or maybe not narrow enough?)
Equitable trade is mutually beneficial.
Being a net exporter means that you lose all your stuff and get a wad of IOUs of uncertain value (inflation, for instance, kills the value of your holdings)
Being a net importer means you incur debt, but get all the wonderful stuff.
Neither of which is particularly healthy, and certainly can't possibly be sustainable in the long term. Think about it: China's status as the world's provider of cheaply manufactured goods means that their own citizens are not benefiting from that massive industrial capacity as much as they could be, and they're sure as hell not benefitting from that capacity if the import side of that is money or ownership stakes in foreign countries, and not, y'know, stuff.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Luckily, when you spill thorium-laced water over a large area of desert, it never gradually turns into wind-borne radioactive dust...
Those workers aren't going anywhere. Those mines will not be shut down just because the US may produce up to 20% of our rare earths domestically. The rest of the world still needs rare earths, and we still need to get 80% of ours from someplace else.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The article says the mine will produce about 20% of China's current output, not 20% of the amount we import.
Who said we were a civilized country anymore? We're being run by a band of brigands intent on looting and pillaging rather than inventing and building, just like a third world banana republic. We ship raw materials and import finished goods, just like a banana republic. We lack any national health care system, when every other civilized nation has one. We execute people. We have more people in prison, per capita, than any other developed nation. We have a higher infant mortality rate than other developed countries. In all ways, we are becoming an uncivilized nation, and I didn't even mention reality television.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.