http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/
How an American company is trying to break China’s monopoly on high-tech minerals.
FORTUNE — Few weekenders making the four-hour run from L.A. to Vegas notice the big mill works overlooking Interstate 15 at Mountain Pass Summit in California, near the Nevada line. Even fewer realize that the pale-pink buildings, gone patchy with age, are the focus of an extraordinary business drama that involves national security, China’s monopolizing the strategic market in rare-earth metals, and one company’s attempt to restore American preeminence in a crucial mining sector it once dominated.
Those sprawling buildings are owned by a Denver mining company called Molycorp (MCP), which is now spending nearly $1 billion to restart rare-earth-mineral production at Mountain Pass Summit and in the process revive a moribund U.S. industry. It won’t be easy. A decade ago the U.S. was the world’s biggest supplier of lanthanides, scandium, and other rare earths, and the Mountain Pass mine was the world’s largest producer of the minerals.
Rare-earth elements enable the creation of super-magnets, which operate at high temperatures and are also used for a range of high-tech applications, from missile-guidance systems to compact fluorescent light bulbs to wind power turbines to motors in electric vehicles.