Can a Radioactive Ore Break China’s Grip on Rare Earths?

The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to wrest share from Chinese firms, which control roughly 90 percent of the markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals. Rare earths are the ingredients on which vast and crucial manufacturing categories depend: semiconductors, LEDs, lasers, displays, metal alloys, optical lenses, and catalysts for petroleum and chemical processing.

Most important, though, are permanent magnets. Essentially all powerful electric motors are based on rare-earth permanent magnets. These motors are the heart of electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, robots, appliances, and tools.

Rare-earth magnets are also in the motors for military systems ranging from tactical drones to ballistic-missile submarines. This article is a collaboration between Foreign Policy, the global magazine of politics and ideas, and IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the IEEE. Succinctly put, any industrial power that wants to remain competitive in vital, high-tech industries must have access to a steady supply of rare-earth elements or products based on them.

The traditional supply chain for these elements, originating in China, is increasingly fraught—so much so that some analysts are beginning to use the term “ mineral war.” The countries that are now scrambling to piece together alternative supply chains, whether by themselves or in cooperation with each other, face daunting odds. Never mind the sheer momentum of the Chinese rare earths juggernaut.

Few industries can match the rare earths business for instability, risk, intrigue, and sheer frustration. And yet, many rare-earth experts see a way forward, and it depends on a specific kind of ore, called monazite.

The ore contains huge amounts of valuable rare earths, including neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Related: Chasing China’s Monazite Monopoly “The future is monazite,” declares Jack Lifton, an analyst, consultant, and author.

Lifton, who has been studying the rare earths industry since 1962, has seen countless trends, companies, and technologies come and go, and he isn’t given to sweeping statements. But on the subject of monazites, he’s bullish.

“Right now, in my opinion, monazite is the most important rare-earth ore,” says Lifton, who is also cochairman of the Critical Minerals Institute, an organization that’s promoting the creation of a North American supply chain. That path forward isn’t going to be smooth or straight, Lifton and others are quick to acknowledge.

Monazite typically contains radioactive thorium and uranium, which means its handling, storage, and processing are tightly regulated by government agencies. It can be processed only with special techniques and procedures, and the mildly radioactive wastes generated by processing must be stored in isolation indefinitely.

Nevertheless, major investment is now flowing to monazite mines and processing technologies. In the United States, Energy Fuels, which operates the country’s only conventional uranium mill, has developed its own extraction process and is producing mixed oxides of neodymium and praseodymium—and also pilot-scale quantities of dysprosium and terbium oxides, key “heavy” rare earths that are otherwise produced almost exclusively in China.

Energy Fuels is processing monazite into rare-earth oxides at its White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. The body of water at left in the image is a tailings impoundment, where radioactive waste from processing is stored.

Energy Fuels The company has spent more than US $200 million to secure monazite assets in Brazil and Madagascar, and plans to scale its rare-earth production to higher commercial levels, at an estimated cost of $410 million. Energy Fuels’ rare-earth ambitions received a significant boost in June, when the Trump administration announced that it had signed a $725 million conditional loan commitment with the company.

Meanwhile, though, a government-backed project in Saskatchewan, Canada, stands as a cautionary tale for monazite backers. After six years of construction and expenditures of more than CA $100 million (US $72 million), a processing plant there has produced only minuscule quantities of rare earths.

The processing plant, built by the Saskatchewan Research Council, was supposed to be producing 40 tonnes of rare earths per month by the end of 2024. “Full operation,” with production of 400 tonnes of metal per year was planned for “early 2025.” That didn’t happen, either.