Abstract
As clean energy technologies develop, improved rare earth element (REE) extraction processes, effective technological systems, policies, and regulations become essential. The United States is dependent on China for REE imports, as they currently dominate 90% of the REE market due to greater capacity and understanding of the REE extraction system. However, the U.S. has an opportunity to enter the market with ore from the Mountain Pass, CA mine. An issue that arises from REE extraction is the new health burdens on surrounding communities of the mine that can be exacerbated by policies and regulations, as seen by China’s current production process. For the U.S. to enter the REE extraction market, both technological systems and designated policies must be designed to create effective systems and equally distributed burdens.
To address the lack of sustainable domestic REE production, a plant in Mountain Pass, CA was designed to increase the domestic production of REEs for clean energy technologies. While Mountain Pass has operated in the past, no long-term plant has been successfully designed to sustain domestic needs of REEs. This newly designed plant has five main unit operations to turn raw bastnaesite ore containing 15 rare elements into rare earth oxides: beneficiation, calcination and leaching, solvent exchange, ion exchange, and precipitation. Using chemical engineering textbooks and prior work at Mountain Pass, we developed a complete REE extraction process and evaluated its technical and economic feasibility.
Our design creates one main product stream, a 99.5% mixed praseodymium-neodymium oxide stream that supports production of magnetic materials. However, this process is not economically viable as it is and loses $1.4 billion per year. This is largely due to massive amounts of hazardous waste streams totaling $1 billion in losses. If other streams were processed fully to oxides, including those containing cerium, samarium, and lanthanum, the process would quickly become viable, achieving an IRR of 58% over the 20 years of the plant’s lifespan. In this case, we would recommend construction and operation of this plant.
The distribution of health burdens of the plant is important to consider for the creation of an REE extraction plant in the U.S. to be fully viable. This paper examines how China’s rare earth extraction policies and regulatory structures influence the distribution of health burdens among nearby communities? It looks at China’s policies and secondary sources exploring the relationship between the stated regulations and the employment of these policies through an Ethics of Care lens. The three main areas of research include the effects of growth policies, lax enforcement, and centralized power on the distribution of negative health effects. While the U.S. and China differ in key political and regulatory structures, these findings help anticipate the social and health impacts of expanding REE extraction in the United States.
The analysis highlights how China’s regulatory and industrial approach to rare earth mining contributes to heightened risks for nearby populations through multiple pathways. Emphasis on meeting production targets to drive economic expansion accelerates environmental harm, while uneven application of workplace safety and waste disposal regulations permits dangerous practices to persist. Additionally, a highly centralized decision-making system restricts local communities from having meaningful input, further deepening disparities in who bears environmental and health consequences. These conditions point to systemic shortcomings in accountability, care, capability, and responsiveness toward impacted groups. Instead of safeguarding vulnerable populations, the existing framework effectively shifts the greatest environmental and health costs onto those least equipped to oppose them.
