RE:Maybe Ucore should talk to these guysDragon, do try and find someone who can explain it to you:
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Based on news releases of Energy Fuels and Neo Performance Materials, the Financial Times carried yet another RE story with an eye-catching headline: The U.S. Is Trying To Secure Rare Earth Elements For National Security. The idea is that Chemours-owned Southern Ionics supply monazite to Energy Fuels, who then supply a concentrate to Neo Performance Materials, who then ship the radiation-free concentrate to their subsidiary Silmet in Estonia for separation.
The spin in the story is, that eventually some finished product makes it back to the US in order to build more fighter jets and submarines.
Sounds like a plan.
Lets do, what the FT hasn’t, and try to look at it from an angle of national security for a moment:
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Raw material supply of a US company in Georgia to a US-owned facility in Texas for pre-processing: so far, so good.
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Then a foreign, China-dependent company takes the pre-processed, non-radioactive product and ships it 10,000 km to Sillame, Estonia, at the outer edge of the EU, 30 km from the Russian border, to a country with 25% Russian - likely Russia-loyal - population, a country permanently under Russian influence peddling and threat, to produce rare earth oxides in an originally Soviet-built facility.
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The refined rare earth compounds are then supposedly shipped 10,000 km back to the US by the China-dependent foreign company passing, within sight of the Russian military base at Kaliningrad while traveling through the largely Russian controlled Baltic Sea.
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Last but not least, all of the involved parties will probably base their transactions on Made-in-China prices (incl. China VAT 13%), ship the material halfway around the globe at historically high freight rates and expect the market including the Pentagon to pay for all that plus their profit.
In terms of supply-safety during times of crisis, also in view of the Financial Times’ “national security”, perhaps a slightly less than ideal plan and the success would solely be measured by the increase of cost.
However, the US government has already committed to Lynas/Blue Line for light rare earth, and for the heavy rare earth semi-committed to Lynas; probably Lynas have to prove that they can separate heavy rare earth themselves competitively, rather than continue shipping of heavy rare earth concentrate to China.
But this is not a story about Energy Fuels, Neo Performance Materials, the Pentagon, Lynas or “national security.”
It is a story about radioactive waste.
https://treo.substack.com/p/china-minister-wants-rare-earth-reconciliation