Well, gosh, there’s always the super mine and refinery that Trump midwifed into existence and that was almost EPA approved when he left office. It could have supplied most of our domestic needs. Whatever happened to that?
The problem with metals like the “rare” earths is not that they’re rare. They aren’t. It’s that the process of refining them requires lots of acid washes. Whereas those acids are just dumped in places like Africa and China, they must be handled in an environmentally friendly way (meaning expensively) here.
There is a video on YouTube about cobalt mining in the Congo.
Natives digging it out of ground by hand in these wildcat mines.
In the same village is a huge open pit mine run by the Chinese. The dust from the mine covers the ground and foliage of everything.
They started noticing that children were being born with all sorts of birth defects.
Missing limbs, cleft palates in a much larger percentage than before the mine existed.
It made me sick to watch.
Every time someone mentions how great electric cars are I tell them to watch this video
I don’t think it’s this one but Niocorp in Nebraska is trying to raise funds to start a rare earth mine.
“Whereas those acids are just dumped in places like Africa and China, they must be handled in an environmentally friendly way (meaning expensively) here.”
Unless it is the EPA doing the dumping as they did in the Animas River.