Rick Mills:
“…It’s a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world, at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.
Little happened at Mountain Pass during the 1950s except for the odd bit of research by the defense and scientific communities, but that all changed in the 1960s with the color TV. The discovery of europium, which emits a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons, ushered in the age of technicolor, and Mountain Pass, which had abundant europium, flourished. Rare earths mined there were also used in medical scanners, lasers, fluorescent lights and microchips.
In 1980, a mis-classification of rare earths had catastrophic consequences for US rare earth mining. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Regulatory Agency placed rare earth mining under the same regulations as mining thorium – a radioactive element that drops out when processing heavy rare earth minerals like monazite. As we have written, the nuclear industry and its future would look a whole lot different if thorium rather than uranium was pursued as the main nuclear fuel. But that’s a different story.
New, onerous regulations on thorium made the mining and refining of thorium-bearing rare earth elements risky. Over the next two decades, the US rare earth mining industry collapsed. Defense One notes that, even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine. How’s that for irony…”