Somewhere in the North Sea, bolted to the seafloor in 30 meters of gray water, stands a 12-megawatt wind turbine. Machines like it anchor national net-zero plans, and governments hold them up as evidence of strategic energy independence: a country weaning itself off authoritarian fossil fuels and building its own clean power.
Inside the nacelle, its direct-drive generator carries tons of neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets. Those magnets were very likely made in China, from rare earths refined in China.
The same dependency runs through electric vehicle motors, smartphone screens, military radar systems and jet engine components. The clean energy transition and the defense modernization programs of every major Western power share a common physical substrate, and that substrate runs, at its most critical processing stage, through a single country.
That makes rare earths a chokepoint, one that was deliberately constructed and strategically maintained, and one that, on current plans, will still be in place in the mid-2030s.
I. The Misleading Name
Cerium, one of the 17 elements classified as rare earths, is more abundant in the Earth’s crust than copper. Neodymium, the element at the heart of the most powerful permanent magnets ever made, is many times more abundant in the crust than tin. The word “rare” in rare earth elements is an accident of 18th- and 19th-century chemistry. The elements were isolated as “earths,” or oxides, from unusual minerals and seemed scarce next to familiar earths such as lime and magnesia. Over two centuries, the name has calcified into a persistent public misconception. It makes the supply problem sound like geological fate.
The ore is in the ground on every inhabited continent. Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greenland, India, Russia, the United States — all have significant deposits. The United States alone has the Mountain Pass deposit in California, one of the richest concentrations of rare earth ore in the world. The supply problem lies elsewhere, in what happens after you pull the ore out of the ground.
Three things make rare earth processing hard. The first is dispersion: rare earths do not concentrate into thick, accessible veins the way copper or iron do. They scatter through host rock at low grades, so you move large volumes of material for small yields. This is expensive, but copper miners move large volumes too, and dispersion alone does not explain why one country controls the supply.
The second is chemical similarity. The fifteen lanthanides sit side by side in the periodic table, and they and yttrium are, from a chemical standpoint, nearly identical. Neodymium and praseodymium are so similar that for many early applications they were used as a combined mixture without separation. Most modern uses need separated products, single elements or controlled blends such as neodymium-praseodymium, typically at purities of 99% or more, and separating them means running dissolved ore through hundreds of stages of liquid-liquid solvent extraction: cascades of mixer-settler tanks in which tiny differences in chemistry are exploited, one stage at a time, to pull each element progressively away from its neighbors. The process parameters, from the choice of organic solvent and the acidity of the aqueous phase to the flow rates and temperatures, have to be optimized empirically for each ore body and each target element. You learn them by running the process, watching it underperform and adjusting, over and over. China has decades of that accumulated knowledge, built across dozens of state-supported facilities, and no one else has it at equivalent scale.
The third problem is radioactive contamination. Most hard-rock rare earth deposits, including carbonatites like Mountain Pass, and monazite-bearing sands carry thorium and uranium; both elements follow the same geochemical pathways through the crust, and southern China’s ionic clays are the notable exception. Processing these ores means handling thorium- and uranium-bearing residues that, depending on their concentration, must be licensed, managed and disposed of under radiation rules. That burden is a central reason the United States effectively exited rare earth separation at the end of the 1990s. Mountain Pass suspended its separation plant in 1998 after dozens of wastewater pipeline spills between 1984 and 1998, some carrying low-level radioactivity, had contaminated the surrounding desert; the mine itself closed in 2002. Licensing, cleanup and permitting costs now weigh on any attempt to rebuild what was closed. Twenty years later, the United States was convening urgent task forces to understand why it had a supply chain problem.
II. Decades of Deliberate Work
A common explanation for Chinese dominance is geology: China happened to have the deposits, so China has the market. That explanation points policy in the wrong direction. If the position were geological, the solution would be mining: find deposits elsewhere, mine them, and the dependency dissolves. The processing capacity that converts ore into material a factory can use is in China because China spent decades building it there, systematically, at costs and by methods that no democratic government could have sustained.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping made a remark during a tour of southern China that has since become the most-quoted line in Western coverage of rare earths: “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.” The standard reading treats this as a declaration of policy. Geographer Julie Klinger calls that reading ahistorical. In the Chinese commentary of the early 1990s, she points out, Middle Eastern oil stood for what had drawn Western intervention into the region, a danger China needed to keep in mind. Read in that context, the remark sounds like a caution about owning a coveted resource.
Whatever Deng intended in 1992, what followed was systematic. The Chinese government subsidized rare earth processing facilities and directed the consolidation of mining operations under state-influenced enterprises. It invested in process chemistry research that built the technical knowledge required to run separation operations at industrial scale. It acquired technical expertise through joint ventures with foreign companies that held processing knowledge — arrangements in which the knowledge transferred to Chinese partners while the foreign companies discovered, in time, that they had exported their core competency. And it kept processed rare earths cheap on world markets. China’s producers have the spare capacity to drive prices down and undercut new competitors, and for decades that made investment in Western processing capacity look economically unjustifiable.
Japan, not China, was the world’s leading producer of rare earth permanent magnets through the 1990s. Companies like TDK, Shin-Etsu, and Hitachi Metals had built sophisticated manufacturing operations around the neodymium-iron-boron magnet, which Masato Sagawa at Japan’s Sumitomo Special Metals and John Croat at General Motors discovered independently in 1982. Chinese producers, backed by state subsidy and operating without the environmental compliance costs of Japanese facilities, undercut Japanese prices for two decades and pushed Japan out of first place. Japan’s magnet makers survived, largely behind a wall of patents, but by 2020 China made about nine in every ten NdFeB magnets on Earth and Japan about one in fourteen.
Molycorp is the clearest single illustration of how this played out in the United States. Mountain Pass in California sits atop some of the richest rare earth ore in the world — a carbonatite deposit of exceptional grade whose existence has been known since the 1940s. Molycorp raised over a billion dollars to rebuild and modernize it into a processing operation capable of producing separated rare earth oxides at commercial scale, before collapsing under $1.7 billion in debt. After 2011, prices collapsed from their bubble highs as manufacturers turned to alternatives, and in 2015 China dropped its export quotas altogether. Molycorp, already struggling with its novel solvent-extraction and reagent-recycling process, could not compete at those prices while operating under US environmental regulations, paying US labor costs, and servicing the debt it had taken on to build the facility. In June 2015, it filed for bankruptcy. Mountain Pass went into care and maintenance, and in 2017 it was sold at auction for just $20.5 million to a US-led consortium in which China’s Shenghe Resources held a non-voting minority stake. Until 2025, most of the mine’s concentrate was shipped to Shenghe in China for processing. For most of that period Washington treated it as a market outcome; Pentagon money to restore separation at Mountain Pass arrived only in 2020.
The processing that made Mountain Pass uneconomic was happening in China at costs that would have been legally impossible and politically unsurvivable in any Western democracy. In Jiangxi province in southern China, the dominant extraction method for ionic clay deposits is in situ leaching: ammonium sulfate solution is pumped directly into hillsides, dissolving the rare earth elements in place and allowing them to drain out for collection. In 2012, Su Bo, China’s vice minister of industry and information technology, called rare earth pollution a “giant black hole.” Environmental bureau estimates put the mining’s output then at over 2 million metric tons of contaminated wastewater a year, with ammonia nitrogen concentrations ten to one hundred times over China’s own national limits. In the Ganzhou mining region alone, mining had directly destroyed tens of square kilometers of land, and contaminated runoff entered rivers that supply drinking water to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou downstream. China’s industry ministry estimated the cleanup bill for southern Jiangxi’s rare earth mines at around $5.5 billion, and experts cited by local officials put full recovery at 50 to 100 years.
China tolerated this damage. For a government with a long time horizon and no meaningful electoral accountability for environmental outcomes in remote provinces, the trade looked worth it. Western democracies would not accept equivalent damage on their own soil; their voters and environmental regulators would not permit it, and so they let the processing happen elsewhere and bought the product at prices that reflected none of its true costs.
The consequence of that arrangement is a processing infrastructure so heavily concentrated in China that it works as a control point for much of global high-technology manufacturing. You cannot rebuild what China has by doing it the way China did it, because the environmental and regulatory costs of Western processing make that arithmetic impossible. Doing it cleanly costs more, and that extra cost has to land somewhere; few of the promises made about supply chain independence say where.
III. What Is Inside Everything
Back to the wind turbine. The tons of permanent magnets in its generator are an engineered composite, and the engineering depends on specific rare earth elements that are not interchangeable.
The base of the magnet is neodymium-iron-boron, or NdFeB in the notation used by magnet engineers. Neodymium, locked with iron and boron into a particular crystal structure, gives the magnet both an intense field and a high coercive force, its resistance to being demagnetized. NdFeB magnets are the strongest permanent magnets known. Their strength-to-weight ratio is what makes compact direct-drive wind turbine generators practical — the kind that eliminate the gearbox entirely, reducing mechanical complexity and the failure rate that comes with it. Offshore, the industry has largely converged on permanent-magnet generators: roughly three in four offshore turbines use them. On land the picture is different. Most onshore turbines still use gearboxes and induction generators that contain no rare earth magnets, and Enercon has long built direct-drive machines whose electrically excited generators need none.
But neodymium-iron-boron magnets have a problem. Their magnetic properties degrade at elevated temperatures. In an operating wind turbine generator, or an electric vehicle motor under load, temperatures routinely exceed the threshold at which a pure NdFeB magnet begins to lose its coercive force. A typical EV motor requires 1–2 kilograms of NdFeB magnet. The standard solution to the thermal problem is dysprosium, or its close neighbor terbium, substituted for part of the neodymium at a few percent by weight and up to around 10% in the hottest-running grades. Without it, a magnet that performs perfectly at room temperature loses its coercive force at the temperatures inside a motor under load.
There is no cheap, plentiful substitute for these heavy rare earths in high-performance NdFeB magnets. Manufacturers have learned to use less of them, and a few have designed them out entirely: in 2016 Honda and Daido Steel put a magnet with no heavy rare earths at all into a production hybrid motor. Across most hot-running motors and generators, though, dysprosium and terbium remain the standard fix. China produces almost all of the world’s separated dysprosium; its share of processed dysprosium was forecast at 99.9% for 2023. Since 2025 one producer outside China, Lynas Rare Earths in Malaysia, has separated dysprosium and terbium commercially, but in volumes that are small next to Chinese output; in the United States, no company had yet produced heavy rare earths at sustained commercial scale by the end of 2025.
A typical EV traction motor contains from a few tens of grams up to around 200 grams of dysprosium, depending on the magnet grade and how much engineers have designed out. A large direct-drive wind turbine generator contains tens of kilograms or more. Terbium, used alongside or instead of dysprosium for the same thermal stabilization, is used in smaller quantities. The projected growth in EV production and offshore wind installation over the next decade implies demand for dysprosium that will significantly outpace non-Chinese supply capacity, which remains a small fraction of what the market needs.
Now set that against the policy commitments already made. The United Kingdom’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan targets 43 to 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The European Union’s REPowerEU plan implies roughly 510 gigawatts of wind capacity by 2030, up from about 190 gigawatts in 2022. The United States Inflation Reduction Act created financial incentives for EV adoption and domestic clean energy manufacturing at a scale designed to transform both industries, although Congress ended its EV tax credits for vehicles acquired after September 2025. None of these commitments names China, but as things stand every one of them rests on permanent magnets that are mostly made there.
Beyond the magnets, the dependency runs through electronics and defense systems. Rare earth phosphors light much of the screen world: many of the white LEDs behind LCD monitors and televisions rely on cerium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet or on europium-activated green and red phosphors, and the fluorescent backlights they replaced used terbium and europium. OLED screens are the exception, since their pixels emit light from organic and iridium-based molecules rather than rare earth phosphors. Lanthanum and cerium go into catalytic converters, optical glass, and the polishing compounds used to finish semiconductor wafers, so rare earth dependency runs through chip manufacturing as well as end products. Yttrium, as yttria-stabilized zirconia, coats the hot-section blades of modern jet engines, forming the thermal barrier that lets them run at temperatures that would otherwise destroy the metal beneath. Since China put yttrium under export licensing in 2025, its price outside China has risen to roughly 140 times its earlier level, and coating firms in North America have had to pause production.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons program in US history, an aircraft designed to maintain air superiority over potential adversaries including China. The Pentagon puts its rare earth content at over 400 kilograms per aircraft, spread across its radar and electronic warfare systems, flight control actuators, laser targeting systems, and thermal management components. In 2022, a Chinese-manufactured samarium-cobalt magnet alloy was discovered inside an F-35 turbomachine pump; the Pentagon halted F-35 deliveries, then signed a waiver to resume them while seeking a domestic replacement. An aircraft built to compete with China depends in places on Chinese processing capacity, and that has been public knowledge for years.
IV. Where the Chokepoint Is
In Western Australia, about 35 kilometers southeast of the small town of Laverton, Lynas Rare Earths operates the Mount Weld mine — one of the highest-grade rare earth deposits outside China. Lynas is an Australian company, majority-owned by non-Chinese investors, and Australian and American politicians cite it frequently as evidence that supply chain diversification is working.
Concentrate from Mount Weld undergoes initial cracking and leaching at the Kalgoorlie processing facility, which officially opened in November 2024 at a cost of A$800 million, and in part still at the Malaysian plant itself. The Kalgoorlie intermediate then ships to Malaysia for solvent extraction, the separation stage that isolates individual rare earth oxides at commercial purity. The final product that a magnet manufacturer or electronics company can use comes out of Malaysia.
The Malaysian facility operated under recurring political threat for more than a decade. Communities near the site raised concerns about radioactive waste disposal, not unreasonably, and Malaysia renewed Lynas’s operating license only in short three-year increments. In March 2026 it finally granted a ten-year license, on condition that no new permanent disposal facility is built and that new radioactive residue is treated rather than stored. The structural dependency remains: Australia does the first stage of processing, Malaysia does the separation, and the argument that Western supply chains are independent of geopolitically exposed processing locations has not been resolved. Meanwhile, Lynas has abandoned its planned US heavy rare earth plant at Seadrift, Texas, after wastewater permitting problems; the Pentagon money behind it now pays for oxides made in Malaysia.
The largest producer of separated rare earths outside China, with government backing from two of the countries most committed publicly to supply chain independence, still ships its intermediate product to a third country for separation because processing at home does not yet exist at the required scale.
The difficulty is the chemistry again: a solvent-extraction cascade cannot be scaled up from a blueprint. Each stage has to be calibrated for the ore in front of it, its ratio of elements, its impurities, the gangue minerals that come along for the ride, and getting a cascade to run reliably at commercial throughput and purity takes years of iteration. The Chinese plants operating today are the product of that iteration, repeated across many plants, backed by state research money and by an operating scale no pilot plant can replicate.
Licensed technology and hired expertise can shorten the climb, but there is no shortcut from “we have built the facility” to “we are producing at competitive yield and purity” that bypasses the operational learning curve. Lynas built its Kalgoorlie plant in under two and a half years, yet more than eighteen months after its official opening it was still being ramped up toward nameplate output. Taking a whole separation chain from construction to competitive, reliable commercial output is a matter of many years and capital measured in billions of dollars. And this assumes the political will to continue funding it through the years when it is producing material at above-market cost, while Chinese facilities continue to price below what the Western facility can match, while the government officials who approved the original funding have been replaced by officials who did not make that commitment and may not share the priority.
China does not need to control rare earth deposits to control the rare earth supply chain. It needs only to remain the dominant processor — which it will, until someone builds a competitive alternative at scale. In 2025 China mined about 69% of the world’s rare earths, but it refined about 85%. For years, even rare earths mined in the United States flowed to Chinese processing facilities: until April 2025, MP Materials shipped most of its Mountain Pass concentrate to China. Myanmar’s large output still goes almost entirely to China. Where alternatives exist, as in Malaysia, they remain small next to China’s capacity. Expanding mining outside China is necessary but nowhere near sufficient, because the chokepoint sits downstream.
One response sometimes proposed as a partial answer is recycling. If rare earths can be recovered from end-of-life electronics and magnets, the argument goes, the dependency on primary supply diminishes. The direction is correct in principle. In practice, recovery of rare earths from end-of-life products has run below 1% worldwide. The reasons are partly technical, since rare earths are distributed throughout complex assemblies in small quantities and are extremely difficult to separate from surrounding materials, and partly economic: at current Chinese export prices, the economics of rare earth recycling are marginal at best. Building recycling capacity to the point where it meaningfully offsets primary supply dependency is a project measured in decades, too slow for the near-term problem.
V. How the Leverage Works, and What It Looks Like When Used
In September 2010, a Chinese fishing vessel collided with Japanese Coast Guard boats near the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Japan detained the captain. Within about two weeks, Chinese customs began holding back rare earth shipments to Japan. No official announcement was made, and shipments sat in customs. The export restriction was never formally confirmed by Beijing, which allowed China to avoid a direct WTO confrontation while the mechanism of pressure was unmistakable to everyone involved. Prices for some rare earth elements rose as much as ten times within months. Japan, which already had a strategy for securing rare metals on paper, sharply stepped up its spending on rare earth recycling technology, magnet substitution research, and alternative supply agreements. The captain was eventually released, the WTO later ruled against China’s export restrictions in a broader case, and China backed off.
The lesson Chinese planners appear to have absorbed from this was that the leverage worked, but that using it too visibly, too hard, and in a context too small to justify the response accelerates exactly the diversification effort it is meant to prevent. A tenfold price spike for some elements was strategically counterproductive, because it pushed buyers to look for alternatives. A smaller, steadier squeeze might have served the same political purpose with less blowback.
The most effective way to use a chokepoint is to keep it open most of the time, with prices low enough that alternatives look irrational and supply steady enough that no one feels urgency, and to hold the option in reserve. For more than a decade after 2010, China held largely to that posture; since 2025 it has not. In December 2023 Beijing tightened its ban on exporting rare earth know-how: extraction and separation technology was already off-limits, and the updated catalogue added the technology for making rare earth magnets. In April 2025, in the middle of a tariff war with Washington, it placed seven medium and heavy rare earths (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium) and the magnets containing them under export licensing; shipments stalled and carmakers outside China had to cut production. In October 2025 it announced a far wider package, adding five more elements and reaching beyond its borders: listed foreign-made products would need a Chinese license if Chinese-origin rare earth material made up as little as 0.1% of their value. After Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in Busan, Beijing suspended that October package until November 10, 2026; in September 2026 the two governments extended their wider trade truce to January 10, 2027, without saying whether the rare earth pause travels with it. Even so, the April licensing regime stayed in force, and in early 2026 China restricted exports of rare earth magnets and other military-relevant materials to 20 Japanese companies with defense businesses.
The Pentagon has assessed that there “would be a high potential for harm to national security in the event of a supply chain disruption,” and most of the processing sits in China. The Pentagon has set itself the goal of a mine-to-magnet supply chain able to meet all US defense needs by 2027, and from January 2027 the existing ban on Chinese-made magnets in defense contracts extends to magnets made from rare earths mined, refined or separated in China, a deadline the domestic supply base, on current capacity, looks unlikely to meet. Take a Taiwan contingency.
Suppose China signals that military action against Taiwan is imminent or underway, and Western governments announce sanctions packages. Within the same week, China’s commerce ministry slows approvals under the export-licensing system it built in 2025, cutting licensed shipments of dysprosium, terbium, yttrium and neodymium magnets by, say, a third, and presents the cuts as domestic supply management made necessary by strategic reserve requirements.
What might follow over the next six to twelve months: defense production lines for advanced aircraft, missile guidance systems, and precision munitions face component shortfalls as existing inventory is consumed. Some production lines can absorb the disruption and others cannot. US and allied rare earth stockpiles begin drawing down; for scale, the US National Defense Stockpile was cleared to buy at most 300 metric tons of NdPr oxide and 450 metric tons of magnet block in fiscal 2025. Industrial buyers across the broader economy face price spikes and allocation shortfalls. Much of the political pressure on Western governments to moderate their response then comes from industrial disruption, spread across constituencies that have no particular interest in Taiwan policy but a strong interest in their production lines remaining operational.
The restriction would be calibrated to hurt Western manufacturing enough to influence decision-making without halting it or triggering the full decoupling that a complete embargo would produce. A complete cutoff would be a strategic mistake for China, because it would push Western governments to fund alternatives regardless of cost and so end the dependency. A partial, deniable restriction keeps the dependency alive while Beijing presses for concessions.
Stockpiling is the acknowledged Western response to this risk. It can buy months while the slower work of building alternative supply goes on.
VI. What It Would Take
Resilience in rare earths asks four things of Western governments, each of them hard.
The first is money paid out for years: above-market price support for Western processors. The market price for Chinese processed rare earths reflects decades of state subsidy and the externalized environmental costs that Chinese facilities paid and Western facilities will not be permitted to pay. A neodymium oxide price set by Chinese producers operating under those conditions is hard for a facility in the United States or the European Union to match for long without government support. A grant or a one-time construction subsidy will not close that gap; it takes long-term operational price support, structured to persist through changes of government, that covers the difference between what a compliant Western processor costs to run and what Chinese competition will price the product at. Until 2025, no Western government had committed to this. Several implied it while appropriating sums that were insufficient by an order of magnitude.
The IEA puts the investment needed to meet demand for magnet rare earths outside China over the next decade at around $60 billion, nearly half of it in refining. The Pentagon’s own commitment to domestic rare earth initiatives between 2020 and early 2024 came to about $440 million.
In July 2025, the DOD announced a deal with MP Materials, a multibillion-dollar package that included a $400 million equity stake and a price floor of $110 per kilogram for NdPr products. This was the first time a Western government committed to the kind of long-term price support described above as necessary, and it set a template: in March 2026 Lynas agreed the same US$110 floor with Japanese buyers and with the US government. At signing, the floor was nearly double the market price. Chinese prices then climbed most of the way to it, and by late August 2026 one assessment put spot cargoes outside China below the floor, at about $95. Price floors now exist; most of the plants that would make them part of a complete supply chain do not.
The second is political commitment sustained for well over a decade and across multiple administrations. US rare earth policy has run in cycles for decades — programs funded, allowed to lapse, rediscovered in the next crisis and funded again at inadequate scale; Congress’s 2022 money for the National Defense Stockpile was its first new appropriation in thirty years. China’s long investment was sustained by a political system that does not face this problem. Competing with it requires Western democracies to demonstrate a consistency of industrial purpose that their record in this sector does not show. The current investments are real and are the most serious effort yet made. They are also contingent on political continuity that cannot be guaranteed, and whether they survive the next election is uncertain.
The third is environmental regulation that confronts its own tradeoffs honestly. Rare earth processing in Western countries often produces thorium- and uranium-bearing residues that need licensed, permanent disposal. Current regulations in the United States and the European Union make the siting of facilities that produce this material extremely difficult. The ways around that are few. The regulations can be modified, which means a political fight with specific communities near specific proposed sites. The work can go to the handful of sites already licensed to handle radioactive residues, as at the White Mesa uranium mill in Utah, which now separates neodymium-praseodymium from monazite. Or the processing can be relocated to countries with weaker regulatory standards, which is supply chain relocation rather than independence. Processing in Kazakhstan, Vietnam, or Indonesia reduces Chinese leverage marginally without solving the strategic problem. A plan for domestic supply chain independence that skips radioactive waste disposal leaves out the hardest constraint.
The fourth, and the one least often stated, is honesty about what success looks like. China will remain a major rare earth processor for decades, whatever Western governments do now. The achievable goal is resilience: enough alternative capacity that a Chinese restriction hurts but does not halt. That is a meaningful goal, and a different one from what politicians describe when they use the word “independence.” Independence and resilience carry different price tags and different timelines. Conflating them lets governments announce the former while funding, inadequately, the latter, and describe the gap between the two as progress.
VII. The Bill
For three decades, Western governments traded long-term strategic resilience for short-term cost. The consequences were foreseen, in government reviews and again after Molycorp’s collapse, and allowed to accumulate because fixing them was expensive, cheap Chinese rare earths were available in the meantime, and the bill would come due on someone else’s watch.
That bill is now arriving: the wind turbine built to reduce dependence on authoritarian energy exporters depends on a supply chain that runs through China, and so does the defense hardware meant to deter Chinese military aggression.
Resilience is the work of well over a decade, and it has to be paid for in the open: sustained public money to draw in far larger private investment, carried by taxpayers, consumers or both. Even if every planned project comes online on schedule, the IEA expects China to still refine about 70% of the world’s rare earths in 2035.
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Some contents of this page were generated and/or edited with the help of a Generative AI.
Media
Mountain Pass Mine – Wikipedia (Tmy350)
Key Sources and References
Section I — What Rare Earths Are
U.S. Geological Survey. Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Rare Earths and Rare Earths (Heavy). February 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-rare-earths.pdf · https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-rare-earths-heavy.pdf
International Energy Agency. “Supply concentration, export restrictions and declining investment put critical mineral security at risk.” Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 press release. 2026. https://iea.org/news/supply-concentration-export-restrictions-and-declining-investment-put-critical-mineral-security-at-risk
U.S. Geological Survey. Rare-Earth Elements. Professional Paper 1802-O. 2017. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1802/o/pp1802o.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Tin. Professional Paper 1802-S. 2017. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1802/s/pp1802s.pdf
U.S. Geological Survey. Rare Earth Elements — Critical Resources for High Technology. USGS Fact Sheet 087-02. 2002. https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs087-02/
U.S. Geological Survey. Rare Earths Statistics and Information. National Minerals Information Center. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/rare-earths-statistics-and-information
California Public Utilities Commission. Eldorado–Ivanpah Transmission Project Draft EIR/EIS, Section 3.7: Hazards, Health and Safety (Mountain Pass pipeline spills). 2010. https://ia.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/info/ene/ivanpah/DEIR_EIS/3_7_Health_Safety.pdf
Science News. “Rare earth mining may be key to our renewable energy future. But at what cost?” January 21, 2023. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rare-earth-mining-renewable-energy-future
Section II — China’s Strategy
Domino Theory. “How a Deng Xiaoping Quote Became China Watchers’ Favorite Anecdote.” https://dominotheory.com/how-a-deng-xiaoping-quote-became-china-watchers-favorite-anecdote/
Engineering and Technology History Wiki (IEEE). “Masato Sagawa.” https://ethw.org/Masato_Sagawa
Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Elemental Strategy. February 2022. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/02/10/elemental-strategy/
High Country News. “Why rare-earth mining in the West is a bust.” June 2015. https://www.hcn.org/issues/47-11/why-rare-earth-mining-in-the-west-is-a-bust/
Fortune. “Molycorp is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” June 25, 2015. https://fortune.com/2015/06/25/molycorp-bankruptcy/
Mining.com. “Molycorp bankruptcy gets messy.” 2016. https://www.mining.com/?p=846783
Mining.com. “Mountain Pass sells for $20.5 million.” June 2017. https://www.mining.com/?p=887888
MP Materials Corp. Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2025 (Shenghe offtake and halt of shipments to China). U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1801368/000180136825000028/mp-20250630.htm
MP Materials. “MP Materials Awarded Technology Investment Agreement with the Department of Defense.” Press release, November 18, 2020. https://mpmaterials.com/news/press-release-11182020/
Section II — Environmental Damage (Bayan Obo / Jiangxi)
MCLC Resource Center / The New York Times (Keith Bradsher). “China Has Paid a High Price for Dominance in Rare Earths.” July 2025. https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2025/07/07/china-has-paid-a-high-price-for-dominance-in-rare-earths/
China Dialogue / Dialogue Earth. “Paying for China’s rare-earth ‘black hole’.” 2012. https://dialogue.earth/en/nature/4890-paying-for-china-s-rare-earth-black-hole/
Yale Environment 360. “China Wrestles with the Toxic Aftermath of Rare Earth Mining.” July 2019. https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic-aftermath-of-rare-earth-mining
“The Monitoring of Rare Earths Mining from the Gannan Area of Southern China Using Remote Sensing Technology.” IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol. 419, 2014. https://dl.ifip.org/IFIP-AICT-419/hal-01220915
Li, B. et al. “In-situ gamma-ray survey of rare-earth tailings dams — A case study in Baotou and Bayan Obo Districts, China.” Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, 151, 2016. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X15301430
Nature / Scientific Reports. “Evaluation of resource and environmental carrying capacity in rare earth mining areas in China.” 2022. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10105-2
Global Witness. “Myanmar’s Poisoned Mountains.” August 2022. https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/transition-minerals/myanmars-poisoned-mountains/
Zhang, Q. et al. “Ammonia nitrogen sources and pollution along soil profiles in an in-situ leaching rare earth ore.” Environmental Pollution, 267, 115449, 2020. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33254692/
Liu, W.-S. et al. “Water, sediment and agricultural soil contamination from an ion-adsorption rare earth mining area.” Chemosphere, 216, 75–83, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653518319702
MDPI Metals. “Separation and Recovery of Iron and Rare Earth from Bayan Obo Tailings.” 2017. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4701/7/6/195
Zapp, P. et al. “Environmental impacts of rare earth production.” MRS Bulletin, 47, 267–275, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8929459/
Harvard International Review. “Not So ‘Green’ Technology: The Complicated Legacy of Rare Earth Mining.” 2021. https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/
Section III — Elements in Devices
U.S. Department of Energy. Rare Earth Permanent Magnets: Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment. February 2022. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/Neodymium%20Magnets%20Supply%20Chain%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf
U.S. Department of Energy. Wind Energy Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment. February 2022. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/Wind%20Energy%20Supply%20Chain%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf
ENERCON. E-44 wind turbine datasheet (externally excited annular generator, no neodymium magnets). GlobalSpec. https://datasheets.globalspec.com/ds/ENERCON/e-44/e65d8a52-99e8-4d0a-9705-b73f5f85d303
Honda Motor Co. “Daido Steel and Honda Adopt World’s First Hybrid Vehicle Motor Magnet Free of Heavy Rare Earth Elements.” July 12, 2016. https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2016/4160712eng.html
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “In Charts: China’s Rare Earths Monopoly.” 2023. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/in-charts-chinas-rare-earths-monopoly
offshoreWIND.biz. “UK Govt Says Offshore Wind ‘Backbone’ of 2030 Clean Power System, Plans to Procure 12 GW More in Next Few Allocation Rounds.” January 2025. https://www.offshorewind.biz/2025/01/10/uk-govt-says-offshore-wind-backbone-of-2030-clean-power-system-plans-to-procure-12-gw-more-in-next-few-allocation-rounds
WindEurope. “WindEurope CEO on the release of the REPowerEU Action Plan and the Esbjerg Summit.” June 10, 2022. https://windeurope.org/news/windeurope-ceo-on-the-release-of-the-repowereu-action-plan-and-the-esbjerg-summit/
Internal Revenue Service. “Clean vehicle tax credits.” https://www.irs.gov/clean-vehicle-tax-credits
“High-efficiency green and red phosphors enable a broader hue-gamut LED backlight.” Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. https://ijeecs.iaescore.com/index.php/IJEECS/article/view/29087
“Phosphorescent Organic Light-Emitting Devices: Working Principle and Iridium Based Emitter Materials.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2008. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2635741/
US Patent US8663501B2. “Green emitting phosphor” (terbium green phosphors in fluorescent lamps). Google Patents. https://patents.google.com/patent/US8663501
Tech Times. “Congress Moves to Break China Rare Earth Grip Before November Deadline.” October 6, 2026. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/328654/20261006/congress-moves-break-china-rare-earth-grip-before-november-deadline.htm
Congressional Research Service. Rare Earth Elements in National Defense: Background, Oversight Issues, and Options for Congress (R41744). 2013. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20130917_R41744_f524dd012737e617d9a79c8bf3a62ad071a52904.html
U.S. Government Accountability Office. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Program Continues to Encounter Production Issues and Modernization Delays (GAO-24-106909). May 2024. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106909
Breaking Defense. “Pentagon approves waiver to restart F-35 deliveries.” October 2022. https://breakingdefense.com/2022/10/pentagon-approves-waiver-to-restart-f-35-deliveries/
Defense News. “DoD inks waiver for deliveries of F-35s, halted over Chinese material.” October 2022. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2022/10/07/dod-inks-waiver-for-deliveries-of-f-35s-halted-over-chinese-material/
Section IV — The Chokepoint
Environmental Protection Authority, Western Australia. “Rare earths mining and processing, Mount Weld.” https://www.epa.wa.gov.au/proposals/rare-earths-mining-and-processing-mount-weld
Lynas Rare Earths. State of the Art Kalgoorlie Rare Earths Processing Facility Officially Opens. Press release, 8 November 2024. https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/LYC/02878791.pdf
Lynas Rare Earths. Mt Weld, Western Australia. https://lynasrareearths.com/mt-weld-western-australia-2/
Lynas Rare Earths. Full Year 2025 Results. August 2025. https://wcsecure.weblink.com.au/pdf/LYC/02985264.pdf
Lynas Rare Earths. Annual Report 2026. August 2026. https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20260826/pdf/0737nx07s3tnf7.pdf
Lynas Rare Earths. FY26 Financial Results announcement. August 2026. https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20260826/pdf/0737tbnynjls6y.pdf
Associated Press (via Mongabay). “Malaysia renews Lynas Rare Earths’ license for 10 years, orders end to radioactive waste by 2031.” March 2026. https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/03/malaysia-renews-lynas-rare-earths-license-for-10-years-orders-end-to-radioactive-waste-by-2031/
Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Critical Minerals, Rare Earth Elements, and the Challenges Ahead for the United States.” 2025. https://globalaffairs.org/research/report/critical-minerals-rare-earth-elements-and-challenges-ahead-united-states
Section V — Leverage
The New York Times (reprinted by YaleGlobal Online). “Amid Tension, China Blocks Vital Exports to Japan.” September 2010. https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/node/29716
Council on Foreign Relations (Eugene Gholz). Rare Earth Elements and National Security. 2014. https://www.cfr.org/report/rare-earth-elements-and-national-security
U.S. Department of Energy. Critical Materials Strategy. December 2011. https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/06/f63/DOE_CMS2011_FINAL_Full_1.pdf
World Economic Forum. “How Japan Solved Its Rare Earth Minerals Dependency Issue.” October 2023. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/10/japan-rare-earth-minerals/
International Business Times. “Japan Rare Earths Imports from China Jump in Dec.” 2011. https://www.ibtimes.com/japan-rare-earths-imports-china-jump-dec-261495
World Trade Organization. DS431: China — Measures Related to the Exportation of Rare Earths, Tungsten and Molybdenum. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds431_e.htm
Reuters (via CNBC Africa). “China bans export of rare earth processing tech over national security.” December 21, 2023. https://cnbcafrica.com/2023/china-bans-export-of-rare-earth-processing-tech-over-national-security
Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology of China. Announcement No. 57 of 2023: Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export (in Chinese; reproduced by the Hong Kong Trade and Industry Department). December 21, 2023. https://www.tid.gov.hk/en/tradecircular/files/2023/ci2023946a.pdf
CSIS. “The Consequences of China’s New Rare Earths Export Restrictions.” April 2025. https://www.csis.org/analysis/consequences-chinas-new-rare-earths-export-restrictions
Mining.com. “CHARTS: Rare Earth Export Restrictions, Price Spikes and the Risks of Demand Destruction.” 2025. https://www.mining.com/featured-article/charts-rare-earth-export-restrictions-price-spikes-and-the-risks-of-demand-destruction/
Global Times. “China suspends export controls on rare earths, other key resources.” November 2025. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202511/1347646.shtml
Ministry of Commerce of China. Announcement No. 61 of 2025 on export controls on relevant foreign rare earth items (in Chinese). October 9, 2025. https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/zfxxgk/fdzdgknr/ztfl/dwmygl/art/2025/art_148254ba99284928ae6e4f84d1d6f297.html
Ministry of Commerce of China. “Head of the Department of American and Oceanian Affairs explains the results of the eighth round of China–US economic and trade consultations” (in Chinese). September 28, 2026. https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/syxwfb/art/2026/art_d9ea01824fc44fd8a29f7dc3f8ca9c72.html
Semafor. “China imposes new export curbs on Japan as tensions rise.” February 24, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/article/02/24/2026/china-imposes-new-export-curbs-on-japan-as-tensions-rise
Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement. Clause 252.225-7052, Restriction on the Acquisition of Certain Magnets, Tantalum, and Tungsten (10 U.S.C. 4872; expanded restriction from January 1, 2027). https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.225-7052-restriction-acquisition-certain-magnets-tantalum-and-tungsten.
BISI. “China’s Rare Earth Processing Dominance and What the Trump-Xi Summit Didn’t Change.” September 2026. https://bisi.org.uk/reports/chinas-rare-earth-processing-dominance-and-what-the-trump-xi-summit-didnt-change
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Critical Materials: Action Needed to Implement Requirements That Reduce Supply Chain Risks (GAO-24-107176). September 2024. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-107176
Aerospace Corporation, Supply Chain Risk Management. “DOD to Build Domestic Mine-to-Magnet Supply Chain.” March 2024. https://scrm.aerospace.org/dod-to-build-domestic-mine-to-magnet-supply-chain/
Congressional Research Service. Emergency Access to Strategic and Critical Materials: The National Defense Stockpile (R47833). 2023. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R47833.html
Congressional Research Service. FY2023 NDAA: National Defense Stockpile (IN12041). October 31, 2022. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IN12041.html
Section VI — What It Would Take
International Energy Agency. Rare Earth Elements: Pathways to Secure and Diversified Supply Chains. April 2026. https://www.iea.org/reports/rare-earth-elements/executive-summary
Energy Fuels Inc. “White Mesa Mill” (licensed uranium mill; monazite processing and NdPr separation). https://www.energyfuels.com/white-mesa-mill/
MP Materials. “MP Materials Announces Transformational Public-Private Partnership with the Department of Defense.” July 2025. https://mpmaterials.com/news/mp-materials-announces-transformational-public-private-partnership-with-the-department-of-defense-to-accelerate-u-s-rare-earth-magnet-independence/
Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “Ex-China NdPr prices slip below $110/kg price floor as oversupply builds.” August 2026. https://source.benchmarkminerals.com/article/ex-china-ndpr-prices-slip-below-110-kg-price-floor-as-oversupply-builds
CSIS. “Developing Rare Earth Processing Hubs: An Analytical Approach.” July 2025. https://www.csis.org/analysis/developing-rare-earth-processing-hubs-analytical-approach
GQG Partners. “Critical Dependence on Rare-Earth Minerals.” 2025. https://gqg.com/insights/critical-dependence-on-rare-earth-minerals/
Other
Air & Space Forces Magazine. “Rare-Earth Uncertainty.” https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/rare-earth-uncertainty/
