Rare earths and the bomb

This article was written by Aaron Jerome. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own.

My postgrad was in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where for unknown reasons I chose to focus my research on the Rare Earth industry. Back then – which wasn’t that long ago - it was a niche issue… My advisor actually asked me if I was sure my topic was political!

It would be fair to say that from the day the U.S. President mentioned the two words ‘Rare Earths’ in connection with settling the Ukraine war, the matter became high politics. (Even if ordinary people were rubbing their heads wondering what they were). For the last six months rare earths have occupied the centre of the US-China trade war. Restrictions via tariffs, export licenses, and unreliable entity lists have kept this matter bubbling like a ragout on a stove.

But there is one story that has never come out in the media discourse and that’s the one I want to mention now.

This November, I had the good fortune of speaking at the 2025 Rare Earth International conference in Kuala Lumpur. During my research on these elements, I became fascinated with the chemical, geological, and historical connection between rare earths (REs) and radioisotopes, and made this connection a key theme of my talk.

The REs sit above the radioactive actinides on the periodic table; they are almost always found in nature with some concentration of thorium and uranium; and the industry itself is a by-product of the quest for nuclear arms.

The parallel lives of two scientists, Frank Spedding and Xu Guangxian, bring the connection between REs and the nuclear elements into sharp relief.

Spedding (1902-1984), was a starving young chemist during the Great Depression, with a research expertise in the REs. While visiting Chicago in 1933, he was approached by a retired Chemistry professor from University of Chicago who offered him several pounds of pure RE oxides as research materials - a remarkable quantity for the 1930s. These were most likely produced at the Lindsay Light & Chemical Co. “Rare Earths Facility” in West Chicago, which refined monazite sands into thorium for gas mantles (clean-up of the irradiated waste from this facility is ongoing almost 100 years later). At that time, thorium was in demand, but Lindsay had few commercial outlets for the RE by-products of monazite refining.

These elements were almost novelty products on the periodic table, but in 1937 Spedding’s burgeoning expertise earned him a professorship at Iowa State College in Ames.

A few years later, that self-learned expertise in RE chemistry brought him to the attention of Manhattan Project scientists in need of a cheaper, purer uranium metal. Spedding’s expertise in the REs readily transferred to the chemically similar uranium and thorium. It was he who conducted the research that enabled the US production of pure uranium oxide and metal for the first nuclear reactor and weapons.

After the war, Spedding returned to less radioactive pastures and focused once more on REs. His breakthroughs applied the lessons he’d learned working with thorium and uranium REs, patenting ion exchange separation of high purity RE oxides and metallothermic reduction of RE compounds to metals. The very same Ames Process for uranium and plutonium metal making also became the basis for RE metal production. Spedding’s research reduced the cost and complexity of processing of REs, enabling their early use as mass-market materials for electronics and magnetics.

In many respects, Xu’s (1920-2015) life was remarkably similar to Spedding’s. Born in China, Xu immigrated to the US where he studied quantum chemistry at Columbia University. He left the US before a Korean War era law banning Chinese students from returning to the communist mainland China came into effect.

Upon arriving home in 1951, Xu was quickly recruited into the Chinese nuclear program to purify weapons grade uranium as part of Mao’s quest to become a nuclear power. Despite his successful contribution, Xu was ‘re-educated’ during the cultural revolution. 

After his rehabilitation in 1972, Xu was tasked by the Chinese government with contributing to the nascent RE industry in China. His most important contribution was enhancing the efficiency of RE purification via the now dominant technique called solvent extraction. His breakthroughs earned him the moniker “The Father of Chinese Rare Earth Chemistry” and turned him into something of a national scientific icon.

A generation earlier, Spedding scaled RE production from grams to kilos. Xu’s work enabled affordable refining of tonnes of REs at a time. Both scientists applied the lessons learned from their respective quests for nuclear weapons to grow the RE industry.

The radioactive costs of refining REs are understood in the industry but often glossed over or minimized in public discussion, particularly when investors may be listening. While no two RE mines are the same, the connection between the most thorium and the most valuable members of the RE family in monazite sands, and the poor management of thorium across RE waste streams, often triggered closure of non-China RE projects: just look at the history of Lindsay Light & Chemical, Mountain Pass mine, La Rochelle, Bukit Merah, or Wolff-Alport, to name but a few.

But, as I quickly learned in Malaysia this year, some RE companies would rather sequester discussions of thorium like Norman Bates’ mother in the fruit cellar...

My invocation of the dreaded “thorium” in Kuala Lumpur led to accusations that mentioning the radioactive costs of RE refining in a talk was ‘bad for the industry’ and ‘unhelpful’. I was further informed I should use the euphemism ‘by-product’ instead of radioactive waste.

Just the opposite is true. Shedding light on mistakes and inconvenient truths is the only way to start reform, and reform we must. There is no ‘climate transition’ without REs, no AI revolution, no national defence (pick one which motivates you most).

Our reliance on China for all things RE is pollutive and the environment is paying the price. Too often, low cost RE projects sacrifice the environment around mines and refineries. These mines produce the elements which might break our fossil fuel habits, but leave local communities saddled with radioactive tailings, or poison their surroundings with fertilizers, acids, and heavy metal pollution. Yet, if the developed countries of the world are serious about both breaking dependence on Chinese RE and protecting the environment, we must resolve this matter by reimporting RE processing and stewardship over the inevitable waste streams, rather than continuing to expect developing nations to shoulder the pollution.

The final irony of this story is that in man’s quest for nuclear weapons of war, an understanding emerged of the elements that have the power – if properly managed – to clean up our energy system and assist to mitigate climate change.

Instead, the opposite is all too often happening. We should be asking ourselves, ‘do we have to trash parts of the planet to save the whole?’