this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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China is encouraging other countries to find new sources which exist on every continent.
They are not nearly as rare as the name implies.
The rarity is the ability to do it without caring about the massive environmental damage often caused while procuring the minerals.
Check my understanding here: It's not that they're scarce, but there's no geological process that concentrates them like copper or gold. There aren't any neodymium seams the way there are gold seams, there's a very little amount everywhere. So you might as well sift the entire Mojave.
Yeah there's a reason people were saber rattling over those offshore deposits Japan claimed, and it's not because undersea mining is cheap and efficient or "they're on every continent what's the big deal"
Finding the labor to mine and process it cheaply enough to maintain profit margins, while simultaneously deporting everyone, is what makes things rare.