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> Surely [PV manufacturing] will be a growing, potentially high margin business because demand will be high
I'm not aware of it being a high margin business now for any Chinese company, and that's with their aforementioned advantages in labor and mining. This is a product whose price has fallen 99% in the past 2 decades. What margin?
If you still want to re-open rare earth mines in the US knowing the economics, and you can follow American environmental and labor standards, then be my guest. It doesn't strike me as a lucrative opportunity but what do I know.
The hypocracy of calling them unserious moments ago.
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ [1]
... and, in this case, to pay special attention to the multiple chapters describing in painful detail just what is involved in refining and extracting Uranium. As in, cubic acres of land mechanically and chemically processed to extract ounces of material ... which is then sent to enormous production facilities, at tremendous cost, only to begin the refinement process.
It is an incredibly long, dirty and energy intensive journey and I am not sure if the ledger of carbon expenses properly accounts for these steps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Combined with seeing how the extractive energy industry has treated old wells, where they do everything in their power to abandon them and put the burden of cleanup and mainteance of that remediation onto the public, I simply have no faith that nuclear power is "safe" as long as it's private industry doing the work.
I'm not hearing much logic in anything you've said so far. I'm convinced you're ideologically opposed to PV and are debating in bad faith here.