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

战场上的稀土:美国如何败给中国

Planet Money

2026-04-25

34 分钟

单集简介 ...

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.  Live event info and tickets here.  Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+ Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts. Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter. This episode was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • This message comes from Apple Business.

  • Now you can control how your business shows up across Apple apps.

  • And starting this summer in the U.S.

  • And Canada, you'll have a new way to show up to an even wider audience of potential customers with ads on Apple Maps.

  • This is Planet Money from NPR.

  • It all starts, as many complicated American sagas do, with prospectors looking for valuable stuff in the ground.

  • And they were actually looking for radioactive materials, uranium in particular.

  • Mark Smith has worked for decades in the mining industry.

  • And this origin story, this is before even his time.

  • In 1949, the mountains between LA and Vegas.

  • So they were running around, their Geiger counters started to click.

  • But, you know, instead of like the really fast click,

  • like you get with something with uranium, click, click, click, click, click, click.

  • It was kind of a click.

  • Click.

  • It was very, very slow, but they knew there was something there.

  • They had stumbled onto a huge deposit of what we now know as rare earths.

  • Obscure metals with hard-to-pronounce names tucked down at the bottom of the periodic table.

  • Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, praseodymium.

  • There was this one element called europium, and it provided.