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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (329975)	4/6/2025 9:17:52 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 356628

If we want the metals, we need to invest in the refineries. If it is just the minerals you want, they are pretty common in North America. It is actually pretty simple. Every few years someone tries to restart production in the US. So far, all have floundered as the market fluctuations killed them. No need to go to war over them. Trade or otherwise. It does take thinking beyond the moment, however. Possibly even something truly off the wall like an industrial policy. I am guessing this is an issue you stumbled across recently. I have been following it since the 1990s as the US sold off its ability to refine the stuff and it became a topic in the electronics industry. Neodymium magnets had become really important for hard drives, and supplies were a concern. So it popped up on my radar.

To: i-node who wrote (329975)	4/6/2025 9:55:11 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 356628

"We need rare earth minerals if we want to EVs." We have them. == "We do need processors but we need to build them." Yeah, that's what I said. Now how does that happen? By making deals with Ukraine so they build refineries and we take all the product? By making deals with Vietnam? How about making deals with Americans to build them here? From my link, "The Defense Department awarded MP Materials a $35 million contract in February 2022 to build a facility specifically designed to process heavy rare earth elements at the Mountain Pass mine. Sloustcher said the heavy rare earths will be refined in a different building, adding that the project is just getting started." ... Will DARPA survive DOGE? Chrisey and her team at DARPA are researching ways to secure a domestic rare earth supply chain using a different kind of method — biomining. The Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource, or EMBER, program is a DARPA initiative to use microbial and biomolecular engineering techniques to separate and purify rare earth mixtures like the ones produced at the Mountain Pass mine, Chrisey said. The program was inspired by microbes found living in harsh, volcanic environments that were using rare earth elements in order to survive, she said.