Abstract
Modern technologies like nuclear reactors and rare earth refineries require people to trust systems they cannot fully see, yet that profoundly shape their lives. My capstone project designs an integrated rare earth element (REE) processing plant that converts bastnäsite‑rich ore from Mountain Pass, California into a high‑purity praseodymium–neodymium oxide product for permanent magnets, addressing U.S. dependence on a concentrated and geopolitically fragile REE supply chain. I undertook this work because the clean energy transition and advanced electronics depend on REEs, while domestic refining capacity and supply security remain limited. My STS paper, “Empiricism and Faith in Sociotechnical Systems,” examines how empirical and faith‑based institutions organize trust under uncertainty in nuclear fission, kosher certification, and medical determinations of brain death. I chose this topic to understand how experts justify acting on complex, opaque knowledge and how they persuade the public that such decisions are legitimate. Together, these projects connect through a focus on legitimacy: the capstone asks how to design a technically rigorous domestic REE refinery, while the STS paper asks how societies decide whether to accept systems like this as trustworthy and just.
The capstone’s rationale is to propose a technically grounded pathway for expanding domestic REE processing capacity. Our process starts from bastnäsite‑rich ore and integrates beneficiation, calcination and leaching, solvent extraction, cerium removal, ion exchange, and finishing to produce a 99.5 wt.% mixed Pr–Nd oxide product suitable for magnet manufacture.
Overall, the capstone concludes that the proposed process is technically feasible and, under optimistic assumptions, economically attractive. At an annual throughput on the order of 10⁸ kg of ore, the plant can produce millions of kilograms per year of Pr–Nd oxide at the target purity. Capital costs of roughly 213 million dollars and operating costs of about 1.44 billion dollars per year are substantial, but when additional rare earth products beyond Pr–Nd oxide are monetized, the internal rate of return is approximately 58%.
My STS paper asks how empirically justified systems come to depend on forms of trust that resemble faith, how faith‑based systems adopt empirical procedures, and how legitimacy is co‑produced when these modes of knowing intersect. The research is significant because it examines high‑stakes domains, nuclear energy, religious dietary law, and the definition of death, where uncertainty cannot be eliminated but decisions carry life‑and‑death and infrastructural consequences.
The STS paper finds that empiricism and faith function as complementary ways of organizing trust in complex sociotechnical systems. In nuclear fission, sophisticated models and safety analyses still depend on confidence in experts and regulators; in kosher certification, scriptural dietary laws are enforced through inspections, documentation, and laboratory testing; and in brain death determination, clinical protocols gain moral and legal force only when endorsed by religious and legal authorities. This perspective reframes my capstone: the rare earth refinery is not only a flowsheet and economic model, but a sociotechnical institution whose success depends on whether communities and regulators regard its risks, benefits, and governance as worthy of their trust.
