REE? Wheeeee!!!! Rare Earth Elements - used in technological stuff. From Colorado's Page Two:
Colorado on cutting edge to reduce China’s rare earth element domination
A Colorado city is now home to the tip of the spear in combating China’s domination of the world-market for rare earth elements (REE). Manipulation of the REE market by China most recently resulted in the shutdown of the Mountain Pass REE mine in California in 2015 after an attempt by Greenwood Village-based Molycorp to reopen what has been the only developed REE mine in the U.S.
A pilot plant, now in operation in Wheat Ridge, which borders Denver to the west, will fine-tune existing technology to extract and purify elements including lithium, scandium, zirconium, beryllium, gallium and hafnium, among others, from domestic ore deposits in Texas.
The plant, built by New York-based USA Rare Earth (USARE) and commissioned June 11, was built to be near the expertise at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, adjacent to Wheat Ridge, during the technology development phase. USARE expects to build a larger plant starting in 2021 at the Round Top REE mine the company is developing near El Paso, Texas.
In a company press release, Pini Althaus, CEO of USARE said, “Our Colorado pilot plant will be the first processing facility outside of China with the ability to separate the full range of rare earths – Lights, Mids and Heavies. Our Wheat Ridge pilot plant is the second piece of a 100% U.S.-based rare earth oxide supply chain, drawing on feedstock from our Round Top heavy rare earth and critical minerals deposit in southwest Texas. Taken together, Round Top and our pilot plant constitute essential links in restoring a domestic U.S. rare earth supply chain, extracting rare earths and processing them into individual REE oxides – without the material ever leaving the United States, thereby alleviating the current dependence on China for the both raw materials and mineral processing.”
Incredible news. Not only for our own use but to export. The enviros started the problem (naturally) 30 years ago and then the Chinese started currency manipulation and price dumping so it was not economical for older mines to compete. Now, there is a new mine coming in that will be able to operate efficiently and compete in the world market.
One huge side-benefit is that you frequently find Thorium ore (Monazite) in with the REEs so Thorium Reactors will become that much cheaper when we start building them. Thorium reactors?
Here: LFTR in five minutes The actual video continues for an hour or more after - it goes into a lot more detail.
The TL;DR part is in the first five minues.
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