Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China
4/24/202634 min
At one point in history, one U.S. company monopolized the rare earths industry. Then China took over the industry. Can the U.S. bring it back?
Rare earths are critical to making, like, everything. From smart phones to electric vehicles to microwaves. They’ve also become a powerful political weapon for China, which controls the majority of mining and processing of rare earths.
Today, we have the story of the rise and fall of America’s rare earth industry told through that single company. It’s a corporate saga made for prestige television about the elements that literally, once, made prestige televisions.
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This episode was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow Up First wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why.
Emily Feng· Host0:22
This is Planet Money from NPR.
Kenny Malone· Host0:27
It all starts, as many complicated American sagas do, with prospectors looking for valuable stuff in the ground.
Mark Smith· Guest0:37
And they were actually looking for, uh, radioactive materials, uranium in particular.
Kenny Malone· Host0:42
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· Guest0:54
So they were running around, their Geiger counter started to click, but, you know, instead of, like, the really fast click like you get with something with uranium, c- c- c- c- c- click, it was kind of a click, click. Very, very slow, but they knew there was something there.
Kenny Malone· Host1:09
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, the bottom of the periodic table.
Mark Smith· Guest1:20
Lanthanum, cerium, uh, neodymium, praseodymium. There was this one element called europium, and it provided- Europium.
Kenny Malone· Host1:27
Europium. How do you spell that?
Mark Smith· Guest1:28
Yeah. E-U-R-O-P-I-U-M.