Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China

**Emily Fang** (0:00)
This is Planet Money, from NPR.

**Kenny Malone** (0:05)
It all starts, as many complicated American sagas do, with prospectors looking for valuable stuff in the ground.

**Mark Smith** (0:13)
And they were actually looking for radioactive materials, uranium in particular.

**Kenny Malone** (0:19)
Mark Smith has worked for decades in the mining industry, and this origin story, this is before even his time. In 1949, the mountains between LA and Vegas.

**Mark Smith** (0:30)
So they were running around, their Geiger counters started to click, but instead of the really fast click like you get with something with uranium, click, click, click, click, click, it was kind of a click, click, very, very slow, but they knew there was something there.

**Kenny Malone** (0:45)
They had stumbled onto a huge deposit of what we now know as rare earths, obscure metals with hard to pronounce names tucked down at the bottom of the periodic table.

**Mark Smith** (0:56)
Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, praseodymium. There was this one element called europium, and it provided...

**Kenny Malone** (1:03)
Eur-opium, how do you spell that?

**Mark Smith** (1:05)
E-U-R-O-P-I-U-M.

**Kenny Malone** (1:08)
That sounds totally made up, like from Avatar unobtainium or some nonsense.

**Mark Smith** (1:13)
It's way easier than I can hardly say the unobtainium, but I can say europium.

**Kenny Malone** (1:17)
But of course, eur-opium, et cetera, none of these were the uranium the 1949 prospectors were looking for.

**Mark Smith** (1:25)
They had not a clue what any of this was. Nobody was using any of this commercially at that point in time.

**Kenny Malone** (1:31)
Yeah, basically no commercial use. Of course, today, rare earths are critical to making like everything from iPhones to fighter jets to microwaves. And now it is China that is processing about 90% of the world's rare earths. But none of that industry existed when those prospectors first heard their little Geiger counters click, click, clicking in that mountainous spot in the California desert.

**Emily Fang** (1:58)
I want to see what it looks like.

**Kenny Malone** (2:00)
Me too. Let's look it up.

**Emily Fang** (2:01)
Yeah.

**Kenny Malone** (2:02)
That is Emily Fang, NPR international correspondent this whole episode, brought to you by Emily and her very excellent reporting on rare earths, the rise of Chinese manufacturing and lots more.
And Emily and I are pulling up on Google Maps approximately where those prospectors went looking. We are zooming in on a spot just off an interstate highway on the border of California and Nevada. Here, let's go to satellite. How would you describe it, Emily?

**Emily Fang** (2:30)
It's kind of just like a giant hole in the ground.

**Kenny Malone** (2:32)
Sure, sure.

**Emily Fang** (2:33)
I wish I had a more technical description.

**Kenny Malone** (2:35)
This giant hole is a mine. It's a dusty, deserty looking spot in between two mountains. It's called the Mountain Pass Rare Earths Mine.

**Emily Fang** (2:44)
Mountain Pass?

**Kenny Malone** (2:45)
Mountain Pass, I think we can agree, is a rad name for like a mine.

**Emily Fang** (2:50)
I never thought about it that way.

**Kenny Malone** (2:52)
No?

**Emily Fang** (2:53)
Maybe in an epic way, like you shall not pass Mountain Pass?

**Kenny Malone** (2:56)
That's right. It feels like a location on a fantasy map. The Mountain Pass.

**Emily Fang** (3:01)
Okay.

**Kenny Malone** (3:01)
Well, radly named or not.

**Emily Fang** (3:03)
For decades, it was the world's biggest producer of aeropium and other light and heavy rare earth metals.

**Kenny Malone** (3:11)
Mountain Pass was key to the United States building one of the most powerful industries in the world until we lost it all. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone joined today by our special co-host slash expert in residence, Emily Fang and today on the show, we have a corporate saga made for prestige television about the elements that literally make prestige televisions, or at least they did at one point and a single location, and really a single company tells the entire story of rare earths. How after they were discovered at Mountain Pass, they became so critical to the global economy, how China took the entire industry away from the US, and how the United States is desperately trying to take it back.
That perplexing Rare Earths discovery back in the California Hills in 1949 at Mountain Pass, well, by the 1960s, it had evolved into a very successful mining operation. People were finding commercial uses for Rare Earths. Some could be processed into and used to polish camera lenses and mirrors, or to refine oil. And the company running that Mountain Pass mine, well, by the 1960s, they had made one of my new favorite, you know, like, atomic age industrial videos with chipper narration about chemicals and explosions and stuff.