DEFENSE DEPARTMENT
Comments (5)
Why weren't the 17 or so rare earth minerals listed? The reader should know what they are as they are the center around which this story revolves.
Also, the writer should tell the readers if other known or suspected rare earth mineral deposits have been located or marked as tentative sites in the U.S. I've worked on superfund site cleanup litigation/histories for nearly 30 years and we always know what chemicals, minerals, waste products, etc. are known or suspected at a designated site so that we can do research on how they were mined (where), transported to a production/refining facility(s), who did the mining, etc.
This information gave us a good look at a mining or refining/smelting facility, the processes involved (esp. of they used acids for reduction), and how much material was used, produced and left as waste-tailings, pilings, landfills, etc. before we could start on cleanup litigation and/or mutually negotiated remedial approaches and costs.
Better to give the reader the gist of the story in the first few paragraphs rather than make them search for something that, in this case, was not there, but was necessary to understand the story about complex mining, refining, and production issues.
PS: I was an investigative news/foreign affairs reporter for 25 years for newspapers, including a short stint in Vietnam/Cambodia, as well as covering domestic and foreign terrorism, some crime related issues, and then on an Organized Crime Task Force for a while before I got involved in environmental affairs for the government. My journalist mentors taught me how to dig for information, make it concise, informative and documented so that the reader could follow the whole article with a basic understanding of all issues involved.
MP is our top pick!
Portfolio Insider at 6:57 PMWhy not send those rare earth minerals to be processed in cheap labor countries like India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Columbia, etc. to create jobs for them ?
yewtaipan at 11:21 PM
When the previous mine owner invested ~1.7 billion USD +, there were severe engineering flaws in the initial processing to reliably extract the REE's from the concentrated crushed ore and transport from the mill to the processing facility.
Anticipated concentrations from initial design calculations were never achieved due to far too much reliance on mechanical and manual operator control that could not keep up with the necessary design volumes, wasting tons of product needing to be reprocessed and handled manually. Multiple Companies failed on the ineptness of a few chemical process engineers to embrace automation and controls to achieve the required separation processes (reference court records from the various lawsuits) .
The separation process, although similar in a few ways to yellow cake processing where REE's are a only a small percentage byproduct of yellow cake production, the extraction process for volume REE's is vastly different requiring more technology and capacity than White Mesa could sustain for economically viable "percentage" quantities.
The previous owner stockpiled thousands of tons of concentrated crushed ore on-site while Mill solutions were attempted but failed due to further inept engineering and cost overruns (see related lawsuits including securities violations).
In order to produce the REE's economically from MP, the on site refinement and production is a critical step to keep costs down by minimizing expensive transportation costs. As REE's are classified as critical national security minerals and MP is one of the highest concentrations available, it should arise again from its failures.
A year ago there was no domestic Mill in the US capable of refining REEs; however, that's changed. The White Mesa Mill in Blanding Utah is capable of Milling domestic REEs. Why isn't MP utilizing the domestic Mill instead of sending it to China, especially if we're so concerned about domestic production, jobs, economy? The optics of the US need for domestic production would appear stronger if domestic services were utilized.
Dawn at 9:49 AM