Lynas is the company desiring to mine the Mt. Weld deposit (a nice rich one it is too). They are going to separate the RE concentrate at that plant in Malaysia. There’s been a vocal campaign against the licensing of that extraction plant and Lynas has, as above, just succeeded in over-turning a previous license refusal. Once up and operating fully the plant should supply some 20,000 tonnes a year of REs. This is a substantial portion of demand outside China: it’s some 15% or so of entire global demand in fact.

And thus we again see how an apparent monopoly isn’t really all that much use to the supposed monopolist. It certainly was true that China supplied 95-97% of the world’s REs. Largely because they were willing to mine and supply at prices that made it not worth anyone else’s while to do so. But when they tried to constrain supply, to exercise that monopoly, instead of being able to exploit us all they simply encouraged the competition that destroys that monopoly.

Markets do indeed work and the only monopoly that can really be exploited is one that isn’t contestable. And an attempted monopoly in something as common as rare earths simply is contestable and thus cannot be exploited.

This is a simple economic point. Contestable monopolies are not exploitable because they will be contested if an attempt is made to exploit them.

There’s also an interesting little technical point about these protests over radioactive wastes. The site in Malaya was formerly an RE separation plant. And it did indeed leave quite some amounts of radioactive waste around. However, this does not mean that there’s a radiation hazard over the new plant. For the two are processing entirely different ores. Ores which contain entirely different amounts of radioactivity.

There is always thorium associated with an RE ore. Sometimes very little, sometimes a lot (10-15% thorium in the ore is not unheard of). Thorium itself isn’t all that dangerous: you’d not want to eat or breathe it perhaps but out in the general environment it doesn’t do much harm. Material that’s up to 500 parts per million thorium can be put into a normal hazardous materials landfill for example, not one for radioactive waste (in the UK that is, were I know the regulations).

Sure, not stuff you want blowing around with the wind but really not as dangerous as some make out. Over and above that the old plant used to process an ore that was much higher in thorium than the new ore for the new plant (I think I’m right in saying that the old plant used to process tin slags which, from that area, can be 1% or more thorium). And it also used to do so under the rules and regulations of the 1950s, a time when we were much more lackadaisical about the dangers of radiation than we are now.

There’s two possible, to me at least, explanations of why everyone is getting up in arms about the possible radiation from this new plant. One is that people simply haven’t understood the above technical issues. Thorium’s not that much of a danger, there will be a lot less of it around and modern regulation won’t allow its release into the environment except in very low concentrations anyway.

The second is more conspiracy minded. The great losers from this new plant will be the Chinese RE producers who find their monopoly being contested. A few years back they tried to buy Lynas itself, presumably to try and maintain the monopoly. If I were a journalist in Malaysia I’d be having a good look around where the money is coming from to run these protests and court cases against the new plant. But obviously, that’s just one of those lunatic conspiracy theories: no more truth to it than the Moon landings were faked, 9/11 was an inside job or Oswald was working in Texas on his own.