Comment on China has stopped exporting rare earths to everyone, not just the U.S., cutting off critical materials for tech, autos, aerospace, and defense

• OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What do you mean a massive stash? Rare earth isn’t banded iron it’s not gold or copper from porphyry copper deposits it’s very spread out throughout entire continents and that’s exactly why it is hard to source, and a part of the reason why china succeeded was their government support eliminated risks of unprofitable business

  The US and Australia ain’t doing shit unless they fund and afterwards support them, or create a state owned enterprise

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• reddig33@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I believe Australia also has a nice stash of them. I do wonder if part of the reason everyone is eyeing Greenland for similar reasons.

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  • huppakee@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The thing is, rare earths got their name because they are barely ever found purely on their own, they have to be separated from other metals which is a difficult and expensive proces. If I understand correctly rare earths are basically everywhere but you want to find a site with a high concentration in order to make it financially feasible.

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    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      More importantly, absolutely none of this has anything to do with China’s near monopoly on rare earth refinement. Rare earth minerals, even high density regions of them, exist all over the world. Digging them up is easy, but separating the actual minerals from the rest of the soil and rock is really hard. That’s the part that China is highly specialized in. No one needs to invade Greenland or fucking whatever to get access to rare earth minerals. The US can dig them up right there at home. What they need is to build out the refinement infrastructure. But they would prefer to outsource the extraction to other countries if they can because it involves strip mining vast swathes of land that could be used for other things.

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