Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2026

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At one point in history, one U.S. company monopolized the rare earths industry. Then China took over the industry. Can the U.S. bring it back?

Rare earths are critical to making, like, everything. From smart phones to electric vehicles to microwaves. They’ve also become a powerful political weapon for China, which controls the majority of mining and processing of rare earths.

Today, we have the story of the rise and fall of America’s rare earth industry told through that single company. It’s a corporate saga made for prestige television about the elements that literally, once, made prestige televisions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.0	It all starts, as many complicated American sagas do, with prospectors looking for valuable stuff in the ground.
0:13.0	And they were actually looking for radioactive materials, uranium in particular.
0:19.0	Mark Smith has worked for decades in the mining industry, and this origin story, this is before even his time.
0:26.3	In 1949, the mountains between L.A. and Vegas.
0:30.6	So they were running around their Geiger counters started to click.
0:34.1	But instead of like the really fast click, like you get with something with uranium, click, click, click, click, click. It was kind of a click, but, you know, instead of like the really fast click, like you get with something with
0:37.5	uranium, click, click, click, it was kind of a click, click, very, very slow, but they knew there
0:44.0	was something there.
0:45.4	They had stumbled onto a huge deposit of what we now know as rare earths.
0:51.1	Obscure metals with hard-to-pronounce names tucked down at the bottom of the periodic table.
0:56.6	Lathenum, serium, neodymium, praesiodemium. There was this one element called Eropium.
1:02.4	E-O-O-P-I-U-M. That sounds totally made up, like from Avatar, Unobtainium or some nonsense.
1:13.1	Oh, it's way easier than I can hardly say the Unobtainium, but I can say Europian.
1:17.3	But of course, Europium, et cetera.
1:19.5	None of these were the uranium, the 1949 prospectors were looking for.
1:25.2	They had not a clue what any of this was.
1:27.8	Nobody was using any of this commercially at that point in time.
1:31.7	Yeah, basically no commercial use.
1:33.8	Of course, today, rare earths are critical to making like everything from iPhones to
1:40.4	fighter jets to microwaves.
1:42.2	And now it is China that is processing
	...

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