US steps up efforts to limit China’s control of critical minerals | Hacker News Reader

US steps up efforts to limit China’s control of critical minerals

mining.com

97 pointsjonbaer54 comments

It is reasonable to have a second source for everything you need. Also if this takes off and the trade war ends at some point it will drive down prices which is always good. This will also drive the tech needed to mine and refine the materials. An example would be the shale gas production in the US. When it stated the tech said you had to be at $80-100 per barrel and now it is as low at $30 (for good or bad).

They should also set up a national reserve of that stuff. It's practically the new oil, your econ halts.

If they exist in friendly countries, and they do, then it's just a matter of setting up the infrastructure. So what it costs, say, $1.8, more per smartphone?

There is a strategic cache. It does not seem large enough to sustain consumer production. In timescales where only consumer production matters I think the market is self correcting. I apologize, I can not find the source atm, but it is an Army report.

Not sure it would matter, since we wouldn’t have the infra to make 100mil iPhones a year to utilize the mineral reserve. Manufacturing is sooooo much bigger than the raw materials

A strategic cache is typically set up not to support normal economic activities or consumer manufacturing, but war time supplies of military equipment.

As I recall, the US strategic oil reserve was tapped by Clinton, Bush, and Obama and various times, specifically to support normal economic activities.

Which they would probably not have done if they had expected a (conventional) war any time soon.

The US has a huge rare earths mine in California.[1] Great technology. Non-polluting. Even the Sierra Club signed off. Bankrupted by cheap rare earths from China. Then, when rare earth prices went back up, hurt by Trump's tariffs. The current management hopes to be self-sufficient by next year, not needing to ship to or from China.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/business/commodities/article/3011687/ca...

Wouldn't tariffs help a U.S. domestic rare earth mine? Unless the assumption is that China imports the majority of global rare earth production, even after being a huge rare earth producer.

In response to Trump's tariffs, China imposed tariffs. So they can't export. Mountain Pass only does basic processing right now; further refining requires a plant that's still being built. So they were exporting to China.

Tariffs only motivate big, long-term projects if you're sure the tariffs will be around for a while. If they're just a temporary bargaining point, building giant plants isn't a safe bet.

And after the trade wars are over, the new motto will be Reaganesque "trust but diversify". And everyone (with the possible exception of China) will be better off because of that.

Depending on how far "trust but diversify" goes, some countries could be worse off (OPEC would be harmed by a serious effort at energy source diversification, US by currency diversification, Netherlands by diamond supply chain diversification, China by manufacturing diversification, etc.). Whether they will be better or worse off in the end depends on how much external near-monopolies hurt them, versus how much their own cornering of a market helps them. China would likely lose out because manufacturing is such a large component of the Chinese economy, but it is not obvious that all other countries would gain.

By "everyone" I meant "everyone involved in the current trade war", e.g. US government, businesses and China (there's no differentiation there between government and businesses at the moment). I don't see why the US should care about not hurting the Netherlands or OPEC countries at its own expense. I was under impression the Netherlands have a functioning government and can stand for themselves. Same with OPEC countries.

A major problem with mining rare earth minerals in the USA is the 1983 legislation to manage the Thorium that comes along with the RE ores.

So, just as important is Senator Rubio's legislation to set up a "Thorium Bank" as a cooperative to transfer the liability from the miners to the bank who will store it for a wee fee and make it available at cost to the co-op.

This will also create a "guaranteed stream" of rare earth minerals to all involved.

Apparently, foreign governments and companies will do all the funding. Which is nice.

(Although given Hauwei's recent problems with US suppliers, I think foreign government might not put much stock in the 'guaranteed' bit)

http://efn-usa.org/2013-11-06-07-29-01/item/2033-summary-for...

The USGS maintains information on the source and risks for various resources we use, at their National Mineral Information Center:

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic

I attended a public talk in 2017 at USGS where someone from the NMIC explained the kind of information they gathered:

https://www.usgs.gov/media/videos/2017-oct-public-lecture-gl...

Indeed, many of our strategic minerals come from unreliable partners. The US doesn't produce much of that stuff internally for economic and ecological reasons. However, potential internal sources for some (not all) are kept mothballed in case we need to switch to them.

It was really interesting watching how geopolitics influences local industrial decisions.

Plenty in Australia, drill baby drill!

Southern California too. I wouldn't worry too much about it medium/long term. The conditions in Inner Mongolia make for cheap prices because they come from loose clay.

Probably also from cheap labor too.

Good. China is anti-democratic and a persistent threat to Western Democracies.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, especially not ones that take threads further into political or national flamewars.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interesting to see where YCombinator stands on this. I assume you are an official moderator on HN?

Correct, dang is a HN moderator. This is a tech news website, and obviously politics and technology do intermingle, but let's not make a sensitive situation worse by encouraging tribal thinking.

Being clear about and resistance against totalitarianism and isn't making it worse. That's old chestnut that gets trotted out a lot -- it just isn't true.

I am, but that comment says nothing about "where Y Combinator stands" on anything except whether HN users should follow the HN guidelines. We stand for yes.

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