News Snapshot:
In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare-earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 600-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs. Today, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are separated before being refined into metals and forged into magnets. But MP Materials, the company that took ownership of the 70-year-old Mountain Pass mine in 2017,...
