There are tungsten mines in the eastern Sierras, closed of course but the tungsten is still there. Rare earth minerals may also be available here. Don’t know.
The major use of rare earths is for magnets used in small speakers and batteries for hand held tools like cordless drills and saws.
In years past, the closing of the rare earth mine in Mountain Pass California has been a popular subject at Free Republic but I have seen a thread on that subject in years, maybe a decade.
Russia has the mother lode of tungsten. All of ours now come from them. We used to have the largest deposits of rare earths in the world - I believe on Montana or somewhere up there, but B. Clinton turned the land into a national park or some such at the behest of his Chinese ‘donors’.
Mining requires people to harvest the ore - but they also lost the War on Natural Resource Harvesters along with farmers, loggers, ranchers, and commercial fishermen.
Eat Plastic, Buy Chinese and Russian! MAaSHA
There are rare earths aplenty situated on an island in southern Alaska. The Pentagon wants to mine them but the environmentalists have their processing hamstrung.
Yup, there's a rare earth mine in California, maybe also Nevada. Shut down because of eco-nut policies. Can be reactivated.
Oops: “On July 10, 2017, MP Mine Operations LLC, a Chinese-led consortium including rare earths miner Shenghe Resources, purchased the Mountain Pass mine out of bankruptcy.” Well, so much for reactivating it by Americans; the Chinese are reactivating the mine in California for their purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_rare_earth_mine