Friday, January 10, 2025

Made in USA

For strategic reasons,  we need rare earth production in friendly, non-PRC hands. 1/8/25 Mining.com:
"  USA Rare Earth reached a major milestone this week with the successful production of the first batch of sintered permanent rare earth magnets at its new plant under development in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

"The production plant — called Innovations Lab — represents part of USA Rare Earth’s vertically integrated rare earth element magnet supply chain, leveraging what it hails as “the only scalable, sintered neo-magnet manufacturing system in the Western Hemisphere.”.
"The company also controls the mining rights to the Round Top deposit in West Texas, which contains a significant endowment of heavy rare earths such as dysprosium, terbium, gallium and beryllium. The mine is currently in its engineering phase, targeting first production in 2025/2026, USA Rare Earth has said."

Strictly speaking, beryllium is not a rare earth.  Still good news.
 
While free trade is generally a good system, strategic materials and goods need to be sourced as locally as possible.   This is part of what sank a number of Eastern Mediterranean empires at the end of the Bronze Age.  Famine caused collapse that ended the transport of tin from Afghanistan and made bronze unavailable. 

I am reading Eric Cline's 1177 BC: The Yesr Civilization Ended right now.  Climate change caused collapse of several nations.  All of these Eastern Mediterranean empires engaged in a globalist economy (for a narrow definition of "global") and only Egypt was sufficiently self-reliant to survive.  The modern implications should be obvious.  One lecture by Cline suggests the climate change was not caused by Hittites driving SUVs 

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