`Mountain Pass rare earth mine closure`

U.S. domestic capacity that closed when Chinese prices dropped; reopenable with five-to-ten-year lead time and ~$1B capex.

And here the Chinese were going to take that away from me. Well, you can't take it away. How much would it cost to redesign all the starter motors on all the cars in the world? Everybody had to start paying these horrendous prices. All of a sudden the government's talking about, what are we going to do, are we going to retaliate? These are the externalities. Are we going to open up mines? They've been talking about opening up rare earth mines in California. We have resources for rare earths — if the price goes up, we can afford to open a mine in the United States. It was only when the price was down low that we couldn't afford to keep it open. We could reopen it. Just takes about a five- or ten-year lead time, and a billion dollars. But a billion dollars is nothing compared to that externality of the value.