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Okay so really quickly,
what I'm going to do is prove to you that there's no rare-earth
crisis and that the western world could enjoy
a position of producing rare-earths quite comfortably, including the heavies,
and do it exclusively by using
current flows of mining waste material.
In that process you will start accumulating a lot of thorium,
and that's where John and I started working together because I couldn't solve the
rare-earth crisis without solving the thorium problem,
and, they're interlinked and we are going to walk though how that works.
Congressional failure equals commercial failure,
There's probably 12 rare-earth bills in congress right now.
Not a single bill -
you could not find me a paragraph in a single bill in congress
that deals with the key issues.
What do we do about China's sovereign monopoly?
How do you do this without lowering BLM standards, or how do you do this
in a way that the United States can actually attract businesses here and technologies here?
No, in fact all they do is
fund more studies of the same thing over and over in perpetuity,
and it gives them something to hide behind while the
problem continues
They offer loan guarantees to people very far down the value chain.
When the extreme amount of capital required to
develop that refinery or that metallurgical facility is extremely high,
and you still have the Chinese monopoly
looming over you.
So, what you're looking at is essentially
setting businesses up for failure because you've never dealt with the number one item.
And, what John and I are working with does that.
There's no shortage of rare-earths, here's a letter from
university in southern florida that works with the phosphate industry
they basically throw away 200% of all the rare earths we need in
this country every year.
So, let's just assume a 50% recovery - ok we're on the road.
Here's an interesting graph that's been around forever.
If you look down there - there's that little purple thing at the bottom
and that is a single industry called the
heavy mineral sands industry,
and at one time they supplied the entire world with rare-earths.
It was a byproduct of their regular business, basically titanium mining,
mineral sands mining for heavier elements, like zirconium.
So they were producing enough rare-earths
for a very long stretch to supply the whole world,
and they actually got up to almost 20,000 tons/year of this by-product,
this waste by-product.
And as China entered the market
and has the thorium risk started to materialize, they just said
"it's not worth it", and they've been dumping all of these monazites and xenotimes
that are
associated with their
core business
into tailings lakes.
so there's just two examples of where you could meet 100% of
America's rare-earth demand, so that's now 100% plus 100%, that's 200%.
Okay.
Let's take this a little further,
Iron-ore mines could easily produce another 100%,
Heavy mineral sands,
copper mines, uranium mines, aluminum mines
even rare earth mines. In fact,
most of the rare-earth mines that are trying to get funding right now
can't get funding because they have a thorium problem.
And, all of the heavies are associated with thorium,
and they don't know what to do with it so nobody fund them.
The mines that do get funded
are mines like Mountain Pass, and Mountain Pass -
they got all of the lights, and none of the heavies.
So, essentially you're trying to solve your rare-earth problem with half of the rare earths,
so it's not going to work.
So, monazite
is the second most common mineralization of rare-earths.
It's the number one source of heavy rare-earths on a global aggregate basis.
If we could solve this thorium problem,
there is no rare-earth problem.
and as John and I have been trying to convince congress that if you could
create a
rare earth cooperative
that could receive the thorium bearing monazites,
and essentially pull out the rare earths
and then take the thorium liability, and hand it over to another entity,
something
we could just simply call the thorium bank.
And, the thorium bank would have very simple, elegant one-sentence piece of
legislation along with it
that says, congress gives the thorium bank
the authority to develop uses and markets for thorium
including energy.
And, with that single sentence
what you've done is you've created the
"big-tent" -
the big tent for developing
a thorium energy economy.
And, the way the legislation is currently written,
it invites in all of our western partners to be owners.
and all of our western partner owners
would effectively also participate
at the government level, at the national interest and at the local level
in the revenue streams to encourage rapid
acceptance and deployment of the technology.
So this is what we're working on,
the problem is
as I've said in the beginning,
US policy -
most western nation's policy [of] zero tolerance for actinides,
assures that China will continue to control the rare-earth market.
and all technologies related in perpetuity until we solve that problem.
because, until you solve the problem you will always be short heavy rare-earths and without those,
you're really not in the business of technology.
So here's typical bastnaesite,
that's what everybody's mining today.
That's basically half of the lanthanide series and
very, very, low levels of yittrium - questionable recovery.
There's a typical monazite deposit, that's all of them.
With monazite you get other
excellent mineralizations like xenotime with heavies.
So, what's the problem? What's the real problem?
Regulation. Liability. Fear and loathing - This word, radiation.
It causes irrationality in the public.
They hear the word radiation
and all of their receptors go up in panic.
How radioactive is thorium? It's a low alpha emitter.
It's got a half of life of
12.5 billion years.
So, really it's not very active, not doing very much.
How is it relative to risks
that we experience every day?
Well, you guys saw an image of banana earlier,
With a bananna, the potassium has
more harmful forms of radiation.
When you cook on a natural gas stove you're producing radon -
that's much more dangerous.
sunlight,
high altitudes,
living in Denver,
all much more dangerous than wearing a thorium pendant around your neck
Let's move on and can deal with it like adults.
Thorium
being treated fairly
on a parity basis with other industrial uses,
you could measure that thorium is a hundred times or a thousand times
or even a million times more
safe,
than things that we use everyday in industry.
take for example anydrous ammonia.
If I have an MFA cap on my head and I go into a
farmer's co-op,
I can get a 500 gallon tank of compressed
anhydrous ammonia.
I can drive back on my tractor, maybe I've had a few [drinks],
I slip off the road right where the school bus is letting kids out,
that anhydrous ammonia is going to kill every single person there or permanently scar them.
and deform them.
We deal with it every day.
Pesticides,
things we use in paints,
things we use to create glass.
[all] much more dangerous than thorium.
I mean especially the most important non-risk factor is it's not water-soluble.
If you took a handful of thorium the size of sand, and you swallowed it,
it's really not going to
damage you in any significant way.
John and I have discussed whether it's going to
disrupt your lower intestinal system because you have a lot of
bacteria there that needs it, but ultimately
it passes right through. Your body doesn't upload it.
so we go "Oh, this is easy to fix",
but the problem is the fear won't go away because we've all been trained
to just -
overreact to this.
So that's why John and I came up with the concept of this
thorium storage and industrial products corporation,
that's a federally chartered entity,
something to give the public confidence.
A federally chartered
facility that's going to accept every single gram of thorium and all the other
actinides that are produced,
and put it away and store it very safely,
but remember that one little thing we wanted.
the authority to develop uses and markets, including energy.
And that, that thorium bank, would solve the rare-earth crisis
in the United States, in Japan, in Korea, in Europe.
Everyone could participate and own the off-take,
because it would be a co-op.
And then you would relegate the risk over to this facility,
and this facility would be the "big tent" where everybody could come in and either
contribute capital,
or IP, and everyone would be rewarded.
Everyone would own it.
Collectively we would combine our forces
because it's a race. It's race against us,
and a single-minded
Chinese bureaucratic industrial policy that's intent on winning the race,
and we are not going to win the race
by throwing up a shingle and saying "I'm doing it first".
We have to do it together, and this is the only way to do it.
What happens if you create this entity?
From a rare-earth side,
basically it will self-fund, because if Toshiba, Hittachi and Siemens know
they have a guaranteed off take
at the exact same proportion to their investment,
the rare-earth cooperative is instantly funded.
and essentially you make sure that none of the rare-earth go outside of the value-chain,
you don't let speculators own it,
and so that problem is is over.
And, because
it's hopefully located here - somewhere,
it's also going to attract the manufacturing facilities and bring back
the technology.
It's going to create jobs.
Congress is fully aware of this. John and I have met with
pretty much everybody on the senate energy committee and
we've met with all the
key players on the house side.
We've met with the administration,
as John said earlier. What are the obstacles?
"Oh, a Cooperative".
That sounds it sounds awfully socialistic.
They forgot how the highway system was built,
or how we lead the world in avionics, etc., etc.
And then, the other complaint is, "Oh, thorium".
That's radiation. That's scary and
we don't do scary.
But we're we're going to work through that and and we've got some
commitments from some very senior people on both sides of the aisle to work though it.
I just wanted to say I've just now solved the rare-earth problem.
Let's move on to what I really care about, which is the energy issues.
Sorry, I apologize to Fermilab but,
the DOE is
the ultimate buggy-whip bureaucracy.
They're promoting a technology
that operates at extreme pressure, low temperature,
utilizes at best, 5% of the energy,
produces massive quantities of
spent fuel that we have to deal with later, that the public has to pay for,
and it's not economically viable by any measure.
The light-water [reactor], it's basically it's the ultimate Frankenstein.
It's the dual purpose military/civilian energy source that we're just going to keep pushing
and pushing and pushing.
There's going to be a real fuel shortage
for this new fleet we're going to build.
In fact, there is going to be a fuel shortage for the existing fleet.
I'm sure somebody's pointed out while I was gone that
Alvin Weinberg was essentially fired
for putting safety first in nuclear.
That's got to change.
The DOE is in the weapons business.
So, regulatory risk. If we can solve the regulatory risk,
We can put this whole thing alright.
If we can solve the regulatory risk,
People like Google,
People like Warren Buffett,
companies like Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer in the world,
they're going to want to say "Hey,
"I don't want to get left behind".
"I don't want to be the guy holding the buggy whip in the automobile comes by",
and they're going to pile in
and we're going to build -
we're gonna be able to build these and roll them out in a
cooperative effort where
multiple nationalities who come in - all step up to the plate - all participate
What's going on at the DOE is a Kodak moment, and if anybody owns the stock I apologize.
You've got to scream as loud as you can. "Why are we going to build the new fleet?"
"There may not be fuel for it."
"It's got too many flaws, there's alternatives."
John and I's legislative concept isn't asking the governement for a dime.
We're just saying give us a pathway
so that people can invest intelligently and safely.
We need to get off this this Kodak moment and move on to the future.
The state department in our government are essentially
stuck in a paradigm where oil is the most important energy commodity.
A lot of our international politics is driven by that and some of its quite ugly.
I just want to point out that China's way down there at the bottom,
and as they and India become greater participants in what's called the
industrial economy,
you are going to have a well over 50% increase in the number of
industrial and economic
consumers of oil and at the same time those actual reserves shrink.
So what do you think's going to happen?
We're using it over here and there's lots of people over there,
those lots of people over there are going to pull it away from us,
and we're gonna experience something like this, but
at levels that will not fit on this graph.
You're talking about price shocks that nobody's ever seen before.
And so, every time those price shocks occur and oil gets up to about $100 per barrel,
the entire western world hits the brakes
and we can't move forward,
and it's very uncomfortable.
I want to point out something over on the edge of the graph
Origin of coal gasification: liquid fuels,
circa 1800.
How about 1820?
The rich folks were burning oil
from whales to light their homes at night.
The poor people couldn't afford it.
so they were burning
oil from coal - and that stunk a little bit but,
by 1860 they figured out how to get the sulfur out.
The problem is in 1860,
Spindle-Top happened, and then everybody was looking for
oil in petroleum underground.
and the the vision of the geyser oil just took over
and everyone basically walked away from the oil from coal paradigm.
Until let's say, about 1942 when Germany recognized that
they couldn't fight a war if they didn't have their own oil reserves,
so they essentially powered their entire air force almost exclusively
on fuels from coal,
half of their ground forces
from fuels from coal. Liquid fuels.
And, the allies didn't like fighting
the German fighters because
there was more energy
in the fuel from coal than there was from the petroleum product,
much cleaner by the way.
So, why is this important?
Because, these petroleum-centric policies are outdated. They're too expensive.
They spread America's and our allies' resources too far across
the world - we have got to stop that.
The future of energy is thorium, and I'm going to tell you why.
It's all about the thermal profile,
and with that thermal profile
you can convert -
America, with the largest reserves of coal in the world
and the UK of course - quite nice reserves,
we can essentially become totally energy independent.
In fact, how about if the United States becomes an exporter of energy?
I'm going to end it now and I want you guys to really contemplate this.
The evolution of economics and energy are intergral,
they have been bound from the very beginning.
The first time a guy figured out how to yoke an animal to drag
a stick that represented an early plow so he could plant something,
and then fire, bronze and then wind,
and then water energy, and then coal and then steam and then oil, and
then all of a sudden, guess what happens?
We hit the brakes here - on the economy because
oil can't fuel the future anymore. It just can't do it.
It's not dense enough, there's not enough of it,
and every time we get another gallon it costs more.
So, they made us a promise right?
They said "Hey,
there's this exciting age of nuclear energy and
power so cheap you can't even meter it."
It didn't happen. Why?
Because, we chose the path of solid fuels.
Solid fuels have inherent problems and they create
externalites costs that are dumped onto the public that will be revealed to us one day.
What I'm saying is there is a new nuclear age,
but it's going to be a liquid fuel system
based on thorium.
That is how we're going to get there and if we don't make that leap
and China does first,
we will be will be leasing that power from them.
We'll essentially all be paying a tax to them,
for every time we cook in our homes or heat our homes,
or turn on a light, or try to out-produce them at Wal-mart.
Guess what? We lose.
We've got to get there first.
I want everybody in this room
to find out who your congressman's phone number is.
Let's get something done. Thanks.
Right on, Jim.
Question: [...] US company such as
Molycorp take care of the thorium,
will the price of the rare earths increase do you think?
Mollycorp are controlled the political debate in our congress
for all 3 years or almost 4 years I was lobbying this issue.
Mollycorp has essentially
defected and they're now part of the Chinese monopoly
Mollycorp only produces about half of the the lanthanides
and they don't have -
I have to be careful what I say -
their business model has some problems and China is still a threat
hanging over them.
So, they have essentially
joined up with another company called Neomaterials,
that in my opinion - is just an extension of the Chinese government
and they are now part of that monopoly and they will be sending all their valuable
heavy rare-earths to China for processing, and we won't seem here again.
So, Mollycorp is not the answer.
Mollycorp was part of a chess piece that was
played against United States congress and the public.
Think about the irony of this,
Mollycorp got american investors
to fund the reopening of their mine for China's benefit.
We were all played for chumps.
and I think people in congress are realizing it,
I think they're angry about it.
There was a very, very, good op-ed letter by congressman Kaufman who's led
the charge on rare-earths,
and I hope that
the sting of what Mollycorp did resonates though congress
and they're willing to re-look at the issue.