You know I'm running for the Colorado House.
And one of the things I'm trying to come up with is ideas for legislation
that can be done at a state level that would advance the cause.
Now, I don't think Colorado has much in the way of rare earth mines.
Colorado definitely would, they mine a lot of
commodities there.
A lot of the materials that you mine
would have trace elements or recoverable levels of rare earths.
What about thorium?
Are they heavy? For sure.
Well, you guys are mining copper, silver, gold.
I think you have some small molybdenum mines. Like, one.
Your molybdenum it's a big one right.
All of that stuff, they're all going to have recoverable levels of rare earths.
The thorium may or may not be a problem with those particular resources.
But the thing is, they're there.
And currently,
you know, for one reason or another, they're mostly just discarded as waste.
Could the state set up their own thorium repository?
No. No, they can't.
We looked at that.
Because Missouri happens to be a very unique non-signatory state.
So they would have a tremendous amount of flexibility and they just can't do it.
They can't do it.
Couldn’t they apply for a federal license with power of the state behind them?
So the problem with the federal license
is the federal license is for two things.
Possession, and the other one is a mill.
The intention with the mill is, you're
grinding, upgrading, concentrating and selling.
Possession is you're probably the intermediary selling.
Those are transaction oriented permits.
And for thorium, because there's no meaningful
commercial uses at the time, what you are is essentially a repository.
And there's no license for that.
And there's a problem because if that stuff sits there for long enough,
when is it no longer feasible to
claim you're storing a material for sale that you can't sell?
And when that occurs, you're admitting what you have is nuclear waste.
You have nuclear waste, you're in trouble.
Right?
So you can apply for NRC permits,
which are designed around the production of uranium for energy,
for the production of something else for weapons use.
All of the weapons use stuff happens at such a high level
I don't think you can get...
I mean, whoever is doing it is doing it.
Nobody else is going in the game.
The old videos, Kirk says, I got a friend who's trying to open a mine.
So is that the mine you're opening up?
The mine that we own is an iron ore mine.
And there are three deposits associated with it.
One is a tremendous super high value rare earth sitting in the tailings lake.
It's 40 years of accumulated mining waste.
The 120,000 tons of rare earths sitting there happen to be
of a distribution that is uniquely valuable.
We have lots of the heavy rare earths required to make high temperature magnets.
It's the best stuff in the world.
And for some reason nature did something really wonderful here.
I've got lots of heavy, rare earths and the thorium
in the tailings lake is very far below threshold levels.
It's so far below threshold levels I can concentrate it
and still not exceed threshold levels.
So for the tailings, like we can put the entire thing into production
and start selling rare earths.
Okay, Jim, why don't you do that?
To who would you sell them? Thank you very much!
So right now, the only final buyer of that material would be China.
So we are trying to put together a series
of commercial scale, proven, joint venture partners
so that we can pass the material
off through a domestic value chain
and end up with fabricated high temperature, rare earth magnets.
The other two deposits are the same waste.
What what was considered a waste material inside the iron ore.
So when you go back underground, you start mining iron again,
the waste stream coming off that will include that same rare earth
that's high in heavy rare earths and very low in thorium.
That's all positive.
The most famous rare earth deposit
associated with our mine is breccia pipes
that contain a monazite and the thorium
sitting in the ground is far above threshold.
So for the most noted resource
at Pea Ridge it all exceeds threshold.
Until we're able to push through a new regulatory
structure for storing thorium,
managing thorium, we've got a real problem on our hands.
For that one resource.
You have resources you can monetize.
Oh, for sure.
And you're saying you have a resource
where, if you want to supply the world with thorium for energy, you could.
But you are not going to exploit that resource
because of the complications of thorium.
When we do the tailings project, hopefully in the next 12 months
we get it started.
That project alone, if we line up all the JV players,
we could we could far exceed U.S.
demand for rare earth magnets.
100%.
But that resource is about a ten year resource.
So no one's building a value chain for a ten year resource.
That’s suicide.
The resource that's in the iron as we go in and produce
the iron, it's going to have a slow, steady, low rate of production.
We can only produce as much byproduct.
It will be a function of how much iron we we make.
We have a fixed iron schedule
so we can't control the production rate on the rare earths.
So what we really do need is to be able to balance it
against the high thoriated deposit.
And, there are other strategies.
So, you know, in fact, if we built a vertically integrated supply chain
by being able to make a credible promise that we have 40, 50
100 years of resource...
problem solved.
In the absence of that, part of our strategy
is that as we get that value chain built
on the apparent long term availability,
it will be the only downstream value chain outside of China's control.
So anybody else in the business of mining rare earths could pass material through.
So we can still get very, very high production numbers.
But that, you know, it's it's kind of like
being in a footrace and you've got to tie one of your feet in a gunny sack.
I don't know. It's just it's just not how you do things, right?
How do you convince a group of companies
to invest the equivalent of $3 billion for a short lived resource?
You just can't.
And there's nobody else that can do it because there is not another
permitted mine, not under China's control, that can deliver
the high value, heavy, rare earths.
It just doesn't exist. So it's us or nobody.
We're doing our best.
But the thorium thing, the problem kicks in for us,
and let's say year seven or year eight, as we're
cleaning up the tails and getting to the end of that.
And we're underground and we start producing iron ore again.
We're going to get a little bit of that feedstock flowing slow and steady.
But we really do need more material
to replace the tailings that we're going to exhaust.