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In response to
"mafic, how's your Swedish? -- (link)"
by
hollywood big shot
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heh, I have a friend who works for LKAB. I should ask her about it. Rare earths are tricky. Finding huge amounts of them isn’t that hard. Extraction
Posted by
mafic
Jan 14 '23, 06:41
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can be. Metallurgy is almost always terrible, which means even giant deposits are often sub-economic. Plus even mining them is technically illegal in Europe. I have another friend who’s spent the last 15 years trying to open a mine at an even bigger deposit in Greenland (not the one they mention), but they *all* have a uranium byproduct, and you can’t mine uranium in Europe. He spent years trying to get that one changed.
So yeah, there are lots of rare earths all over the place, but they’re tough, plus nobody’s really sure how much China has, so maybe they crash the price when you open your mine anyway.
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