14 lines
1.7 KiB
JSON
14 lines
1.7 KiB
JSON
{
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"HubID": "5276",
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"Date": "6/9/2025",
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"HubTags": [
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"External Platform Posts",
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"Future Map"
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],
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"Contacts": "",
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"Companies": "",
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"File": "",
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"Image": "5276__Image_URL.jpg",
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"Summary": "<p>Rare-earth elements (the 17 “REEs”) aren’t scarce in the Earth’s crust; the difficulty is that they rarely occur in ore bodies rich enough to mine economically, and separating them requires chemical processes that are energy-intensive and generate toxic and sometimes radioactive waste. The United States’ largest deposit is the Mountain Pass mine, just inside California near the Nevada border, which currently supplies roughly 15 % of global REE ore and is being rebuilt to handle domestic separation as well. Starting in the 1990s, the U.S. let most of its refining capacity shut down while China—backed by state subsidies and looser environmental rules—expanded to roughly 60 % of global mining and nearly 90 % of downstream magnet production. Cheap Chinese supply slashed the cost of everything from smartphone speakers to EV motors; without it, many modern electronics would likely have reached the market later and at much higher prices. Could the U.S. ramp up full-cycle production today? Yes—Mountain Pass is already operating and several new separation projects are slated for the next two years—but doing so under current environmental and labor standards would make REEs markedly more expensive in the near term. The longer-run hope is that AI-driven process control, robotics, and economies of scale will push costs back down, yet bridging that initial cost gap is one of the toughest hurdles in any U.S. re-industrialization plan.<span></span></p>",
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"Notes": ""
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} |