Critical Minerals: Reducing U.S. import reliance with substitution and recycling

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108687

by Jimmc414 • 7 hours ago

45 57 7 hours ago

lightedman• 6 hours ago

As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place.

And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.

Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.

nba456_• 5 hours ago

Micron had to delay their New York memory fab by a year because there were some bats in trees. This stuff is DOA in most states.

tencentshill• 6 hours ago

If the government want to pay for my electronic scrap, great! I've got a box of 2nd-gen Intel CPUs, bidding starts at $3000.

seydor4• 5 hours ago

Why is everyone preparing for war so hard

kingkawn• 5 hours ago

Cuz they don’t believe in anything else anymore except violence

goalieca2• 5 hours ago

Because China has stated they will take Taiwan, they have been threatening Philippines sovereignty too. Japan and others are on edge too. China currently has been behaving very adversarial and has a huge fraction of the minerals under their control that this article is posting about. I think sovereignty is a good thing. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

lardosaurusrex• 5 hours ago

The USA keeps threatening my country; Canada.

I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.

amykhar• 4 hours ago

And yet all sorts of people are advocating for using Chinese LLMs because they are less expensive. It seems like a very risky move to save a few dollars.

maxglute2• 3 hours ago

That's misattribution of the the why. The real why is US can't do the sensible thing and cede regional hegemony to growing PRC. There's always the normal solution of watching PRC bomb PH schoolgirls while buying their rare earth and selling them semi, like the rest of the world when US bombs school girls. The why is US leadership pathologically can't not fight, including the fights most of their pop don't want to fight.

jorblumesea• 5 hours ago

great distraction for the masses from the files

robotnikman• 5 hours ago

I hope its less because of war and more because its better to not be so dependent on other countries, similar to how Europe is trying to rely less on the US for digital infrastructure.

I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.

ido• 4 hours ago

In the 70s it was offshoring to Japan. China’s market opened to the west in the late 80s/90s.

seydor4• 3 hours ago

When goods don't cross borders, armies do. Dependence is necessary for peace

1970-01-012• 5 hours ago

War with China has been on the roadmap for 10+ years.

AnimalMuppet3• 12 minutes ago

Yeah, but not for 2030. IIRC, Xi has demanded that China's military be ready to take Taiwan in 2027.

narrator• 4 hours ago

The military build-up in China is world war scale.

georgemcbay2• 4 hours ago

Why is everyone preparing for war so hard

Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.

If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).

pfdietz• 4 hours ago

Canada needs a nuclear deterrent.

SoftTalker• 4 hours ago

Humans have had major wars throughout history, it's unrealistic to really think that will change. It's in our nature.

seydor4• 3 hours ago

Yet we have wars for oil, not water.

gustavus• 4 hours ago

A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.

This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.

The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.

The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.

The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.

seydor4• 3 hours ago

China is dependent on world exports for its future and seems to be trying hard to keep that going, particularly under Xi. It's the US that seems hellbent on breaking globalization.

Also, technological changes in our times are slow compared to the end of 19th century. Nukes are 60 year old tech and cheap drones are not particularly sci-fi tech machines.

jandrewrogers2• 4 hours ago

A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more. As time has passed, reality has not diverged from those models, so confidence in the conclusions have grown. It is worth noting that this pre-dates current political dramas, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, etc. The underlying strategic geopolitics driving it is much deeper than those issues.

It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.

Jalad• 4 hours ago

A war with large geographic scope has been independently modeled as having a high probability of occurring circa 2030 by major governments for a decade or more

Do you have more information about this, or a source?

petcat2• 4 hours ago

There is a lot of nuance missing in public discourse about the US threats of leaving NATO, stopping direct arms support of Ukraine (except for intelligence), and generally scaring NATO members and Europe into funding their own defense.

Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.

Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.

znort_2• 4 hours ago

because the empire sees no other way but war to maintain dominance, scratch that, avoid dissolution. so folks all over the world prepare, and rightly so if u ask me.

spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.

btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.

ifwinterco• 4 hours ago

War is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe

znort_2• 3 hours ago

that's one term of the equation. the other is that war is the tool of banking cartels.

RetroTechie• 3 hours ago

Because some idiot leaders threw diplomacy & international law out the window?

So.. back to how things were done in the old days.

mindslight• 3 hours ago

The Juche is on the loose.

pianopatrick• 41 minutes ago

This level of preparation does not strike me as "so hard". Seems to me that if we in America and Europe were really preparing for a war there are a lot of things we would want to do that we are not doing.

Veliladon• 5 hours ago

Start by banning disposable vapes. The sheer waste of lithium from those fucking devices is insane in 2026. We need every scrap of it we can get!

cinntaile• 1 hour ago

Its market value is clearly not high enough or they wouldn't use it in disposable vapes.

AngryData• 41 minutes ago

I think the problem is more that non disposable vapes are illegal and unavailable to most people.

RazorBucksICO• 23 minutes ago

We need to lighten up on smoking. Professionals should be able to smoke and drink in the office and every else can stop being a baby about it. Yes it stinks, but so do your coworkers. Haters need to step aside.

AnimalMuppet3• 19 minutes ago

In the office? Only if their office has a separate air supply.

They should be able to do what they want. They should not be able to affect me by what they want. Selfish people need to step aside.

1970-01-012• 4 hours ago

Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing.

https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778956

maxglute2• 3 hours ago

TFW "near term potential" F35s will get their radars.

Critical Minerals: Reducing U.S. import reliance with substitution and recycling

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