One of the singular features of Baotou, an industrial city of 2 million people in Inner Mongolia, is a 10-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) lake that is among the most polluted in the world. The artificial lake, referred to by the name of the dam associated with it, Weikuang Dam (or Baogang Tailings Dam), has for decades collected the effluent from minerals processing for China’s globally dominant iron, steel, and rare-earths industries. Built in the late 1950s, the lake contains a highly toxic stew of industrial chemicals with substantial amounts of radioactive thorium, the latter resulting primarily from the processing of monazite ores for rare earths. China has since greatly tightened its environmental regulations and restrictions on mining and minerals processing. For example, largely because of the environmental disaster that is Weikuang Dam, the country doesn’t permit the development or operation of stand-alone monazite mines—that is, mines where nothing is mined except monazite ore. Now, with industrialized nations in North America, Asia, and Europe spending billions to shore up their rare-earths supply chains, and counting on monazite to help them do it, China’s history and experiences with monazite offer important lessons. This article is a collaboration between Foreign Policy, the global magazine of politics and ideas, and IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the IEEE. Monazite ore is a pillar of China’s rare-earths industry because it is a prime source of some less common but extremely important rare-earth elements, notably dysprosium, terbium, yttrium, and erbium. The country mines and processes vast quantities of monazite ore; it also imports huge amounts of monazite ore for processing. Most of the domestically mined monazite ore comes from a single mine: the mammoth Bayan Obo complex, 150 kilometers north of Baotou in Inner Mongolia. Bayan Obo, which is primarily an iron-ore mine, also happens to contain the largest known rare-earth deposit in the world. It’s the source of nearly half of all the rare-earth ore mined on the planet in a typical year. Most of the rare-earth ore mined at Bayan Obo is a type called bastnaesite; it’s the mining of that bastnaesite that makes it legal to mine monazite ore at Bayan Obo as well. Related: Can a Radioactive Ore Break China’s Grip on Rare Earths? All told, ore from Bayan Obo was used to produce 170,000 tonnes of rare-earth metal last year, according to David Merriman, research director at the minerals intelligence firm Project Blue. Roughly 30 to 40 percent of the rare-earth ore mined at Bayan Obo is monazite. That amount alone would be enough to make China the world’s largest processor of monazite for rare earths. China’s 2025 Monazite Imports Topped 70,000 Tonnes But a more detailed picture of China’s interest in monazite emerges when you consider the country’s imports of the ore. Last year they amounted to more than 70,000 tonnes, says Thomas Kruemmer, a Singapore-based consultant on minerals and metals. That figure becomes more impressive when you consider the unique challenges of shipping monazite by sea. Because of its radioactivity, concentrated monazite ore is classified as Class 7 dangerous cargo under the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code. That means, Kruemmer notes, that the ore can be imported through only four ports in China. In addition, importation of some kinds of monazite into China is supposed to go through a joint venture consisting of the China National Nuclear Corp. and Shenghe Resources, which are at least partly state-owned. But lots of imported monazite doesn’t go through those organizations, notes Merriman. That’s because heavy mineral sands, which may contain roughly 2 or 3 percent monazite by weight, are not subject to the same import controls as concentrated monazite ore. So companies import the heavy mineral sands; separate out various profitable concentrates, including the monazite mineral concentrate; and then process the monazite concentrate to recover the rare earths. China has lately stepped up its efforts to secure rare-earth ore around the world. One reason, says Kruemmer, is simply to make up for recently lost supplies. In 2025, the U.S. government invested US $400 million in MP Materials, which operates the Mountain Pass mine and processing facility in California. The deal put an end to longstanding contracts under which MP Materials had been selling tens of thousands of tonnes of rare-earth concentrate annually to a trading affiliate of Shenghe Resources. But other Westerners speculate that China has strategic reasons for stepping up its efforts to acquire heavy mineral sands or other rare-earth assets abroad. By locking down rights to deposits or projects abroad, Chinese organizations are making them unavailable to non-Chinese developers, according to this reasoning. Merriman points out that your view of these activities largely depends on where you sit. The U.S. government recently made a conditional loan commitment of up to $725 million to U.S. monazite processor Energy Fuels, which has been aggressively securing substantial monazite supplies in Australia, Brazil, and Madagascar. To a Chinese observer, those moves probably look rather strategic. China, meanwhile, is doing what it has been doing for decades. “China’s playing its game,” says Merriman.

The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to wrest share from Chinese firms, which control roughly 90 percent of the markets for rare-earth oxides and rare-earth metals. Rare earths are the ingredients on which vast and crucial manufacturing categories depend: semiconductors, LEDs, lasers, displays, metal alloys, optical lenses, and catalysts for petroleum and chemical processing. Most important, though, are permanent magnets. Essentially all powerful electric motors are based on rare-earth permanent magnets. These motors are the heart of electric vehicles, heating and cooling systems, robots, appliances, and tools. rare-earth magnets are also in the motors for military systems ranging from tactical drones to ballistic-missile submarines. This article is a collaboration between Foreign Policy, the global magazine of politics and ideas, and IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the IEEE. Succinctly put, any industrial power that wants to remain competitive in vital, high-tech industries must have access to a steady supply of rare-earth elements or products based on them. The traditional supply chain for these elements, originating in China, is increasingly fraught—so much so that some analysts are beginning to use the term “mineral war.” The countries that are now scrambling to piece together alternative supply chains, whether by themselves or in cooperation with each other, face daunting odds. Never mind the sheer momentum of the Chinese rare earths juggernaut. Few industries can match the rare earths business for instability, risk, intrigue, and sheer frustration. And yet, many rare-earth experts see a way forward, and it depends on a specific kind of ore, called monazite. The ore contains huge amounts of valuable rare earths, including neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Related: Chasing China’s Monazite Monopoly “The future is monazite,” declares Jack Lifton, an analyst, consultant, and author. Lifton, who has been studying the rare earths industry since 1962, has seen countless trends, companies, and technologies come and go, and he isn’t given to sweeping statements. But on the subject of monazites, he’s bullish. “Right now, in my opinion, monazite is the most important rare-earth ore,” says Lifton, who is also cochairman of the Critical Minerals Institute, an organization that’s promoting the creation of a North American supply chain. That path forward isn’t going to be smooth or straight, Lifton and others are quick to acknowledge. Monazite typically contains radioactive thorium and uranium, which means its handling, storage, and processing are tightly regulated by government agencies. It can be processed only with special techniques and procedures, and the mildly radioactive wastes generated by processing must be stored in isolation indefinitely. Nevertheless, major investment is now flowing to monazite mines and processing technologies. In the United States, Energy Fuels, which operates the country’s only conventional uranium mill, has developed its own extraction process and is producing mixed oxides of neodymium and praseodymium—and also pilot-scale quantities of dysprosium and terbium oxides, key “heavy” rare earths that are otherwise produced almost exclusively in China. Energy Fuels is processing monazite into rare-earth oxides at its White Mesa Mill in southeastern Utah. The body of water at left in the image is a tailings impoundment, where radioactive waste from processing is stored.Energy Fuels The company has spent more than US $200 million to secure monazite assets in Brazil and Madagascar, and plans to scale its rare-earth production to higher commercial levels, at an estimated cost of $410 million. Energy Fuels’ rare-earth ambitions received a significant boost in June, when the Trump administration announced that it had signed a $725 million conditional loan commitment with the company. Meanwhile, though, a government-backed project in Saskatchewan, Canada, stands as a cautionary tale for monazite backers. After six years of construction and expenditures of more than CA $100 million (US $72 million), a processing plant there has produced only minuscule quantities of rare earths. The processing plant, built by the Saskatchewan Research Council, was supposed to be producing 40 tonnes of rare earths per month by the end of 2024. That didn’t happen. “Full operation,” with production of 400 tonnes of metal per year was planned for “early 2025.” That didn’t happen, either. The organization is now targeting late 2027—by which time the project will have cost more than CA $216 million, according to the SRC’s CEO, Mike Crabtree. Outside of North America, major monazite projects are also planned by Astron Limited, Hastings Technology Metals, Iluka Resources, Mkango Resources, Sovereign Metals, Steenkampskraal Holdings, and Tronox, among others. Perth, Australia–based Lynas Rare Earths, the largest rare-earths company outside of China, is expanding its monazite mining and processing operations. Most notable is the Lynas mine at Mount Weld, Australia, one of the world’s top monazite resources; the ore is processed at a sprawling facility in Malaysia. Of course, for countries outside of China, all this surging activity doesn’t guarantee a route to rare earths independence. It’s not even close. So the vital questions now are, What else has to happen to broaden and diversify the rare-earths supply chains? And can all of this be done safely? What Are the Advantages of Monazite Ore? Planet Earth has enormous quantities of monazite ore, in two different forms. In Australia, Canada, China, and South Africa, massive deposits of monazite take the form of veins of hard rock that run through mountains and calderas. Much of the new interest in monazite, though, is focused on a second type, called heavy mineral sands. The sands are the result of tens of millions of years of exposure to wind, water, and gravity crumbling mineral-rich rocks into grains, which then accumulated in coastal areas or alongside riverbeds. A particularly desirable form of monazite ore is found in heavy mineral sands, such as these on a beach in Brazil. Travel Pix/Alamy Within those grains, the monazite is relatively hard and chemically inert. The monazite might be just a few percent by weight, but it typically contains between 45 and 70 percent rare earths by weight, including, in many cases, all of the necessary rare earths for magnets: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. “The best distribution of rare-earth elements that you can find anywhere is in monazites,” says Constantine Karayannopoulos, former CEO of Neo Performance Materials and now a director of or adviser to several rare-earths firms. “The real money is in those four elements.” Dysprosium and terbium, both examples of “heavy” rare earths, are particularly sought after and are usually not present in the most commonly mined ore for rare earths, called bastnaesite. There are vast deposits of monazite-bearing heavy mineral sands in Australia, Brazil, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and South Africa, with smaller ones in China, Idaho, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the southeastern U.S., and Vietnam. A geologist points out dark veins of hard-rock monazite ore in the Steenkampskraal mine in South Africa [top]. Ore samples from the mine are collected for analysis [above].Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images What’s more, collecting the ore simply involves dredging or strip-mining the sands, as opposed to the blasting, drilling, and heavy earth moving required to get at hard-rock ores. Then, too, the sands are already in granular form, so they don’t need to be crushed or ground, like rock ores do. Separating out the heavy minerals from the sands can usually be done at the mining site, using relatively cheap magnetic or gravity-based techniques, leaving a relatively high grade of concentrate for further processing. And now the bad news about heavy mineral sands. “The problem is they tend to have a lot of thorium,” which is weakly radioactive, says James Kennedy, president of ThREE consulting, a rare-earths advisory firm based in Missouri. “The thorium is the single biggest problem” with using the sands, he says. “If you were mining and processing monazites for rare earths, you would end up with hundreds and eventually thousands of tons of thorium-containing radioactive residues” per processing facility. The only markets for thorium are a couple of tiny ones for welding rods and some optics, he says, so “you have to store it.” And under the rules for nuclear material set by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, any stored radioactive material that doesn’t have a planned use or disposal pathway is considered nuclear waste. “So the [radioactive] liability suddenly far exceeds the value of anything you’ve mined and sold,” Kennedy says. It wasn’t always this way. Up until the 1950s, monazite was the main ore mined for rare earths. Companies processed heavy mineral sands from Australia, Brazil, and India, and hard rock from South Africa, to produce rare earths for tracer ammunition, steel alloys, cigarette-lighter flints, and, later, color-TV phosphors. The Mountain Pass mine and processing plants, in California, are the only large-scale rare-earth production facilities in the United States.David McNew/Getty Images Several developments combined to shift rare-earths production from monazite to bastnaesite. In 1949, a vast deposit of bastnaesite ore was discovered at Mountain Pass in California. By the early 1960s, bastnaesite had eclipsed monazite as the primary rare-earth ore. In the 1990s, with rare-earth production shifting to China, the move toward bastnaesite continued with the exploitation of massive deposits in that country, such as those at Maoniuping, that were either entirely or mostly bastnaesite. Now, though, any resurgence of rare-earth production outside of China may hinge on a monazite renaissance, and some observers are taking a hard look at the strict regulations that control the handling of thorium and other by-products of monazite processing. Those regulations, Kennedy insists, will throttle the rare-earth ambitions of the world outside China, unless governments take action now. “You rationalize the regulations around thorium and you will end the rare-earth crisis in the U.S.,” he declares. “You’ll turn rare earths from something that’s always scarce to something that is common and just naturally flows out of other mining.” How to Scale Rare-Earth Processing Using “Waste” A prime example of Kennedy’s vision already exists at Energy Fuels, based in Lakewood, Colo. It’s the only company in the U.S. licensed to process, handle, and store compounds of uranium, and among the very few licensed to store radioactive materials of any kind. Those permits give Energy Fuels the distinction of being the only U.S. entity allowed to process monazite ore for its rare earths. “Supersacks” containing a tonne of neodymium-praseodymium oxides were loaded on pallets at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill.Energy Fuels The company is moving aggressively to capitalize on that distinction. Energy Fuels’ main business is still uranium—last year it produced nearly 500 tonnes of it. But it has already started selling rare-earth oxides, following a modest $22 million investment in a small rare-earth processing facility at White Mesa Mill in Utah, where it also processes uranium. In September 2025, the company announced that it had sold 1.2 tonnes of neodymium-praseodymium oxide to South Korea–based POSCO International Corp., a leading maker of permanent-magnet assemblies for EV motors. Around the same time, Energy Fuels disclosed that it had raised a further $700 million. In December 2025, the company announced it had produced small quantities of dysprosium oxide. Tiny amounts of dysprosium are needed for motor magnets to ensure they keep functioning at high temperatures. Today, essentially all of the world’s dysprosium comes from China. Energy Fuels says it can produce 1,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide a year at White Mesa Mill. But its rare-earth production there currently shares facilities with the uranium operations, so they cannot both be produced at the same time. Its monazite comes from the chemical company Chemours, which mines heavy mineral sands in Florida and Georgia to produce titanium and zirconium. The monazite ore sold to Energy Fuels is what remains after Chemours strips out the minerals it needs, namely ilmenite and zircon. The chemical company Chemours mines heavy mineral sands at sites in the U.S. states of Georgia [seen here] and Florida. Monazite extracted from the sands is sold to Lakewood, Colo.-based Energy Fuels, which processes the ore into rare-earth oxides.Chemours “Effectively, monazites are waste,” Karayannopoulos points out. “So you don’t have to dig another mine” to produce them. Chemours and Energy Fuels have agreements under which Chemours ships 500 tonnes of monazite annually to White Mesa Mill. Energy Fuels is also negotiating or already has deals that would give it access to enormous reserves of monazite ore in Australia, Brazil, and Madagascar. These will be essential for its ambitions to become a world-class supplier of rare-earth oxides. Mark Chalmers, former CEO of Energy Fuels, led the uranium company’s entrance into the rare-earths business.Jesse Rieser/The New York Times/Redux “We’re playing a long game,” says Mark Chalmers, who recently retired as Energy Fuels’ CEO and is now a consultant to the company. “We’re doing the engineering right now on a larger facility that will have the capacity to produce up to 6,000 tonnes per year” of rare-earth oxide, he said in an interview. For comparison, Lynas Rare Earths produced around 12,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide in its most recent fiscal year. In announcing the $725 million conditional loan commitment with Energy Fuels, the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital said the deal would help Energy Fuels scale up its output of rare-earth oxides and also help realize the company’s plans to turn the oxides into metals, a key step preceding the fabrication of magnets. What Are the Risks in the Rare-Earth Supply Chain? To see what can go wrong with a monazite project, consider the project in Saskatoon, Canada, where the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) has built and demonstrated a pilot plant to produce rare-earth oxides from monazite ore. It’s the only rare-earth extraction and separation plant in the country. In an email, a spokesperson said the plant “is scheduled to be commissioned by year’s end and after a production ramp-up phase, operational within the calendar year 2027.” When in “full operation,” at a time not specified by the spokesperson, the plant will have a capacity somewhere between 400 and 600 tonnes of rare-earth metal per year. But even that relatively modest output will depend on a reliable supply or “feedstock” of monazite. In an industry small enough that many of the top people are on a first-name basis, SRC’s inability to secure such a supply is an open secret. “Their problem is they haven’t got enough feedstock to run on a continuous basis, so they’re making sample runs,” a well-connected industry observer told IEEE Spectrum. (SRC declined to make an official available for this story.) In April 2024, SRC announced it had reached agreements with a Vietnamese organization, the Hung Thinh Group, for 3,000 tonnes of rare-earth carbonate per year for five years. It’s unclear how much of that feedstock has made it to the SRC facility. Vietnamese government restrictions on the export of monazite and bastnaesite have been in effect since 2022 and became law this past January. But the real twist here is that one of the largest, highest-grade monazite deposits in the world is just 800 kilometers from Saskatoon, near Alces Lake in Saskatchewan. It’s likely that the SRC facility was conceived and built with that monazite deposit in mind. After all, as a government-owned entity, SRC says its mission is “to help the people of Saskatchewan strengthen the economy with quality jobs and a secure environment.” The Alces Lake deposit is owned by Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. In an interview, Appia’s CEO, Tom Drivas, talked up the possibility of a link between Appia and SRC. “SRC would be our logical option because, you know, it’s in the same area, same province. They need the monazite. And if we can supply the monazite, that’s sort of a natural, right?” It probably won’t happen, though. The logic of rare-earth mining is utterly different from the logic of mining a commodity like, say, copper. Multiple experts contacted by Spectrum suggested that the cost of developing a monazite mine at Alces Lake, including such necessary infrastructure as roadways, electricity, and water, would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Such costs, and the mercurial exigencies of the rare-earths market, make it unlikely that the government of Saskatchewan would commit that kind of money, even with help from the Canadian federal government. These factors help explain why Canada, which has some of the most attractive deposits of rare-earth ores on the planet, along with impressive mining companies and resources, has no operating mines for rare earths. Meanwhile, SRC is pursuing other options. Under a deal announced in May with REalloys, in Euclid, Ohio, REalloys will spend $20.6 million for upgrades to SRC’s Saskatoon facility, while SRC develops technology to produce rare-earth metals from rare-earth oxides. The deal also gives REalloys the right to purchase up to 80 percent of the SRC plant’s output. Where will the feedstock come from? Hard to say, but REalloys also struck a deal with U.S. Critical Materials Corp. for 10 percent of the hypothetical output of a mine in Montana called Sheep Creek. Sheep Creek reportedly has substantial amounts of hard-rock monazite that’s unusually low in thorium. But it’s far from certain that those deposits will ever be mined. The proposal for developing a mine there, in a breathtakingly scenic area near the headwaters of the Bitterroot River, has attracted fierce opposition from environmental groups, outdoor enthusiasts, and local officials. Taken together, SRC’s recent moves have left industry veterans nonplussed. “I’m not sure what their business model is,” said one. “They say, ‘we’re a research institute. Our mandate is to help industry.’ The reality is, they’re competing with industry.” SRC has also drawn scrutiny for some questionable business practices. In 2022, SRC board member Dennis Fitzpatrick was fired after raising concerns about the qualifications of an engineer hired to manage and direct operations at SRC’s Saskatoon plant. The president and CEO of SRC at the time, Mike Crabtree, was responsible for the hire. A subsequent investigation of Fitzpatrick’s claims by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. detailed a wide and troubling web of relationships and practices surrounding the SRC’s rare-earths initiative. (Fitzpatrick did not respond to multiple emails.) For example, past business associates of Crabtree’s were reportedly appointed to positions of authority without any other candidates being considered and without their connections to Crabtree being made public. In one case, in 2021, Crabtree disclosed that he was offering a venture capital firm, Westbridge Capital, an opportunity to invest in the rare-earths plant. But according to Fitzpatrick, Crabtree never mentioned that the VC firm was run by an SRC board member who also happened to be one of Crabtree’s business associates—or that Crabtree himself was a trustee of Westbridge and an investor in the company, as well as a paid advisor. Crabtree remains as SRC’s CEO. Managing Toxic By-products From Rare Earths Putting aside SRC’s missteps, the organization does have one advantage: It holds multiple licenses from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to handle, process, and manage radioactive materials. And that’s huge. Most of the radioactive burden associated with processing monazite ore comes from substances produced during processing. In one of the early steps, pulverized, powdery ore is dried and then leached in strong acids—a process called cracking—to produce a rare-earth concentrate. Waste products of this step include a slurry containing thorium hydroxide and much smaller amounts of uranium hydroxide. The rare-earth concentrate then undergoes an extraction process to isolate specific rare earths, such as neodymium or dysprosium. More thorium and also radium are produced during these steps. Waste barrels were photographed in 2024 at Energy Fuels’ White Mesa Mill, where ores containing uranium and rare-earths are processed and refined.Jesse Rieser/The New York Times/Redux The thorium hydroxide slurry, meanwhile, is typically deposited in heavily regulated waste cells, called tailings impoundments or tailings ponds. The thorium hydroxide, either in the form of a slurry or a powder, must be stored in isolation from the environment indefinitely. Energy Fuels stores waste from its longstanding uranium production operations, as well as its new rare-earth operations, in tailings impoundments at its White Mesa Mill facility. The impoundments are just 10 kilometers from the community center of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, a group of Indigenous people, which has vigorously opposed operations at White Mesa Mill for more than 20 years. Virtually all of the thorium is the isotope thorium-232, which is only weakly radioactive. Its radiation is alpha particles, which cannot penetrate human skin. Nevertheless, improper storage can have serious consequences, particularly if the thorium is inhaled or ingested. “Have a look at the gravitational separation of HMS [heavy mineral sands] in Nigeria,” Thomas Kruemmer, a rare-earth consultant and analyst, wrote in an email. “There is lots of dust in the Nigerian processing sites, which the workers inevitably breathe in. And inside your respiratory system there isn’t any protective skin, so alpha radiation develops its full potential. This is something many people do not consider.” In 2012, protestors in Malaysia [top] rallied against the Lynas rare earths processing facility [above], then under construction near Kuantan. Left: AFP/Getty Images; Right: Goh Seng Chong/Bloomberg/Getty Images Moreover, adds Kruemmer, “it is not thorium itself. It is the decay isotopes of thorium that are highly radioactive.” One decay product of thorium is polonium, he points out, “the preferred poison for [killing] Russian dissidents.” In 1982, a company called Asia Rare Earth, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Chemical, began extracting yttrium from monazite ore in Perak, Malaysia. Local residents soon began complaining of various illnesses. With the consent of the Malaysian government, the company had built a waste channel to a nearby disposal site, where the waste was stored in open steel barrels and in an unlined waste pond. The waste overflowed from the pond whenever it rained heavily. In 1984, a Japanese professor measured radiation levels at and near the pond and found them to be, in the most extreme cases, hundreds of times higher than internationally accepted maximums. A subsequent investigation found extremely high levels of birth defects and eight cases of leukemia in the small community near the waste dump. In 2011, at age 69, Lai Kwan prepared to bathe her 29-year-old son, Cheah Kok Leong [top]. Cheah Kok was born with severe mental disabilities that Lai Kwan believed were caused by exposure to radiation that she received while working at a rare earths processing plant in Bukit Merah, Malaysia [bottom, photographed during its disassembly].Rahman Roslan/The New York Times/Redux A protracted legal fight among local residents and Asia Rare Earth and the Malaysian government culminated in the closure of the plant in 1992. By that time, so much radioactive material had been carelessly dumped that cleanup took more than two decades and cost Mitsubishi an estimated $100 million. The episode still haunts the rare-earths industry in Malaysia, where Lynas now processes monazite concentrate at the largest rare earths processing facility in the world. That plant, in Kuantan in the state of Pahang, has been the subject of organized and active local opposition that began even before its commissioning in 2012. The Malaysian government has sporadically tightened its regulations on the plant, stipulating that, for example, radioactive wastes be shipped out of Malaysia or that the processing stages that create radioactive residues be accomplished outside of Malaysia. Kennedy notes that if monazite ore is to become a major source of rare earths, much larger quantities of thorium will need to be disposed, probably more than could be economically accommodated in lined and isolated tailings ponds. One of the very few options for using such large amounts of thorium involves nuclear power. Years ago, countries including the U.S., Canada, Norway, and Germany had thorium-reactor research programs, and India has had a slow-moving program for decades. But today, the only operating thorium power reactor is in China. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has been operating, since 2023, a 2-megawatt molten-salt-cooled reactor that is thorium-fueled. The world’s only operating thorium reactor is a 2-megawatt unit at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In October 2025, technicians used mechanical arms to analyze samples of the reactor’s molten-salt fuel.Jin Liwang/Xinhua/Getty Images A couple of Western startups are keeping the thorium reactor dream alive. A Franco-Dutch company called Thorizon says it has designed a reactor that would be fueled by a mixture of thorium and spent nuclear fuel. Startup Copenhagen Atomics is working on a 1-MW reactor that’s a prototype for a 100-MW, mass-manufacturable, molten-salt reactor. Processing of monazite ore could provide fuel for an enormous number of thorium reactors far into the future. Consider a single large facility producing 5,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide a year. If the monazite contains 7 percent thorium, the plant would also be producing roughly 700 tonnes of thorium a year. According to Rusty Towell, a professor at Abilene Christian University in Texas who directs an advanced-reactor project there, a tonne of thorium would be sufficient to generate about 350 MW (electric) for a year. So the large processing facility alone would be throwing off enough thorium annually to keep 2,450 100-MW reactors operating for a year. That amount of power—245 gigawatts—is about half of all the generating capacity growth forecast for the United States over the next decade, a period during which analysts expect accelerating electricity growth due to increasing numbers of data centers and electric vehicles. What Could Strangle Rare-Earth Supply Chains? Virtually all rare-earths experts foresee a growing role for monazite. But given the problems with thorium, local opposition to some projects, and political instabilities connected to others, some have muted expectations. “The sole and single monazite hope rests with Iluka’s expensive project in Australia, IMHO,” writes Kruemmer. Iluka Resources, based in Perth, is now building a massive rare-earths refining facility at Eneabba, 275 km north of Perth. It will process a million-tonne monazite stockpile that accumulated over decades from the company’s other mining operations. The cost of the project is estimated at AU $1.8 billion (about US $1.3 billion). In a US $1.3 billion project, Iluka Resources is building a massive facility in Eneabba, Australia, to extract and separate rare earths from a million-tonne stockpile of monazite, visible in the background of this photo.Iluka Resources For other experts, though, the biggest challenges facing monazite projects isn’t thorium, or radiation, or regulations. It’s the blend of quirks, misconceptions, and self-dealing that dog the entire rare-earths industry. “The rare-earth mining business is the Afghanistan of mining,” quips Kennedy. It’s a place where people and companies go with grand ideas, only to become ensnared in quagmires. One fundamental problem is the highly speculative nature of almost every aspect of the rare-earths business, which lends itself to backroom deals. In particular, the industry is plagued by speculators who buy stakes in a project with no intention of staying with the project through completion; they cash out as soon as they can profit from any future favorable news—a technique known as “pump and dump.” Consider the Trump administration’s decision to take a 10 percent stake in USA Rare Earth in exchange for $277 million and to provide a $1.3 billion secured loan to the company. USA Rare Earth has the rights to a deposit called Round Top near Sierra Blanca, Texas. The company hired the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald to raise $1 billion in equity financing for the deal. Cantor Fitzgerald, as it happens, is run by the sons of Howard Lutnick, Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary. Meanwhile, there is no rare-earths mine at Round Top, and it’s a distinct possibility that there never will be. “The current administration consistently fails to seek expert advice and is recklessly pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into speculative [rare-earth element] processes and projects, like Round Top, that have little chance of commercial success,” says Terry McNulty, a mining consultant based in Tucson. Geoff Atkins, vice president of business development of the Canadian rare-earths firm Ucore Rare Metals, had advice for his colleagues at a convention of the Critical Minerals Institute in 2022. “Instead of focusing on your speculative value,” he said, “instead of being able to say we’ve got the biggest project in the world, instead of, ‘we’ve got a [net present value] of $3 billion or $4 billion,’ how about you say, ‘we’ve got a project which is going to get into operation, and this operation is going to provide the greatest value to our shareholders in the long term, not just in the short term when we can pump this up and, you know, the [early] investors can sell out. “Because unless there is that shift,” he warned, “we’re not going to have any hope of getting the volumes we need to give the certainty to the downstream supply chain.” In short, the rare-earths industry outside of China needs to grow up. And sooner rather than later.

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