Rowow @iRowow

@robert_ivanhoe @BankofAmerica Negative TC/RCs say this is structural, not a cycle. New concentrate takes a decade to bring on, so scrap and recovered copper is the only feed that scales on the smelters' timeline. Whoever pulls clean copper from scrap at scale captures the margin the smelters just lost.

@NBaidmehta Restarting a defunct refinery beats building new. The site and permits already exist, so the real work is fixing the process and bringing trained operators back. Pairing it with rare earth magnets is the real signal: refining skill carries from copper to the harder metals.

@MBAeconomics1 Price floors solve the money risk, but capacity is the slower problem. A refinery takes years to build and skilled people to run, and a guaranteed price does not shorten that. Same gap across critical minerals: plenty of metal, far too little capacity to process it here.

@Rororourboat79 @Energy_Fuels @ASM_aus The hard part to value is the middle step, turning mixed ore into single metals. A mine and a magnet plant both have clear market comparisons, but the separation capacity between them barely exists outside China, so analysts have almost nothing to price it against.

The story behind reaching out to another mining channel and what I learned. About community, collaboration, and the mining-content ecosystem. youtu.be/VrcvKmEfZ6I

@beatsinbrief Magnet plants only cut import dependence if the step before them is done at home too. Rare earths come out of the ground mixed and must be split into single metals first, and that still happens almost entirely in one country. Skip it and the choke point just moves downstream.

@ucore Congratulations, getting to qualification samples is the milestone that actually matters. Producing NdPr oxide is one thing, but hitting the consistency a magnet maker will design around is the wall most separation projects hit. Good to see a North American line clear it.

@paola_rojas @AdamasIntel Agreed it is structural. A price spike does not call up new supply quickly, because the bottleneck is separation capacity, not material in the ground. What high prices change is what becomes worth recovering, so spent magnets and scrap start paying their own way first.

Before you run SEM TECH at home, watch this. Failure modes, safety, and the one mistake that ruins cells. youtu.be/H0BoS_z9ntU #safety #electrochemistry

@City_Business The siting is the easy part. The real test for nodules is the processing, since each one carries manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper together, and pulling four metals from one feed is where the economics get hard. Whoever cracks the separation onshore changes the supply picture.

@Nairametrics Those demand curves only matter if processing keeps up, and that is what lags. New mines take ten to fifteen years, and most lithium and nearly all graphite are still refined in one country. Recovery from spent batteries is the only supply that scales on the same clock as demand.

Proof-of-function for the DIY ion exchange membrane: cell assembly, test setup, and live results. Not theory, this is the bench data. youtu.be/CuFFl4NJDOw #electrochemistry

@KairosPraxis The east kept dropping prices each time a facility tried to build out. You can look it up

Negligible for a full month is the number that matters, because it forces buyers to act rather than wait. Once automakers and defense suppliers start qualifying non-Chinese magnet sources or redesigning to use less rare earth, that demand does not fully come back even when exports resume. A long squeeze quietly builds the very competition it was meant to prevent.

E-waste is a far richer feed than ore, a tonne of old circuit boards can hold more gold than several tonnes of mined rock. So the hard part for a recycler is rarely the chemistry of pulling the metals out, it is collecting a steady, clean stream of the right scrap. Funding the collection side is usually the smart move, since that is the bottleneck that decides whether the recovery plant ever runs full.

At about a hundred seven dollars a kilo, the interesting part is what it does to scrap. NdPr that expensive means magnet grinding waste and worn-out motors suddenly pay for their own recovery, and pulling it from old magnets skips both the mining and the hardest separation steps. Recovered feed can come online in months, which is the only timeline that matters when a shortage is already here.

The uranium-mill angle is the underrated part here. Rare earth ore almost always comes with radioactive thorium, and getting licensed to handle that is what stops most new separation plants before they start. Energy Fuels already holds those licenses, so the real advantage is that they skip the slowest permit in the chain, which matters more than the loan headline.

The number that tells the real story is the split: 40k tonnes of shredding but only 20k of refining capacity. Shredding dead batteries into powder is the easy half, the value and the difficulty both sit in the refining that pulls lithium, cobalt and nickel back out to battery grade. Europe's strength here is exactly that back end, so pairing it with Indian scale skips the part that usually takes years to get right.