Posted by noleary 3 hours ago
It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
Ignoring your ignorance for a moment, the logic you could have realized is, the US did it to save money and line their pockets. Political affiliations have nothing to do with it.
Mining and refining rare earth is a dirty process. NIMBYs pushed it farther and farther away until it was on the other side of the world.
But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprised if such a solution was even mentioned.