Big Ideas Lab - Rare Earth Elements

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Rare-earth elements are hidden inside nearly every piece of modern technology - your phone, electric vehicles, fighter jets. They aren't scarce in number. They're scarce because pulling them apart is one of the hardest problems in chemistry, and the United States depends almost entirely on other countries to do it.At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are borrowing a solution nature spent millions of years perfecting - and inventing new materials that could make overlooked elements suddenly valuable - to rebuild a domestic supply chain from the ground up.Guests featured (in order of appearance):Scott McCall - Materials Physicist and Emeritus Actinide and Lanthanide Science Group Leader, LLNLDan Park - Synthetic Biology Group Leader, Biosciences and Biotechnology Division, LLNL--Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series.Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch.Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell.Script by Levi Hanusch.Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell.Narrated by Matthew Powell.Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

They called it Silver from Clay, and Henri Saint-Claire DeVille had finally produced enough of it to display as shining bars laying beside France's crown jewels in the Paris Exposition of 1855. Around the same time, Napoleon III was showing off the medal as silverware to his most important dinner guests. It was worth more than gold, the equivalent of $115 per pound. The element itself was everywhere, but no one knew how to separate it into something pure and usable. Still, everyone wanted it.

It was shiny, conductive, and corrosion-resistant, a technical marvel. And in 1884, the largest single cast of it was installed as the pyramid atop the Washington Monument. Only two years later, a 22-year-old in a woodshed behind his family's home in Oberlin, Ohio, would finally figure out how to extract the element from the earth all around him. The metal quickly went from a royal luxury to a material entire industries were built around. By 1893, its price had fallen to just 78 cents a pound. It's the material you know today as aluminum. The phone in your pocket, the laptop at your desk, even the speakers or in ears you're

listening to this podcast on. Inside is some level of aluminum. But there are also elements you may never have heard of that are equally as important. Rare Earth elements. And they give us a familiar problem. If you go in your backyard and you dig up some soil or rocks, you'll probably have a few hundred parts per million of rare earths in there. But getting that concentrated to a level where you can actually economically extract it is a challenge.

And extracting them is only the third. first problem. The real challenge is turning what's in the ground into something industry can actually use all the way through the supply chain. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions. Discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today. If you pull up an image of the periodic table,

you're greeted with an assortment of familiar elements all grouped together. But at the very bottom, there are two rows floating clearly apart from everything else. The top row of that is the lanthanides, and there are 15 elements there. That's Scott McCall, a materials physicist at Lawrence Livermore. And then there are a couple of other elements that behave very similar. chemically to these that are Yitrim and Scania. Those together make up the rare earth elements. You may not notice them on a page of the periodic table,

but you most certainly feel the effects of them. To realize how much of your daily life you actually benefit from having rare earth elements they're in your phosphorus and your screens, they're magnets in all kinds of places, they're in your cell phone. The spices of modern technology. You don't use much. A pinch here, a pinch there.

But leave them out, and the whole thing falls apart. They're essential all over the place, making the quality of your daily life better. The reason comes down to one main idea. Rare Earths make extraordinarily strong magnets. And that means that the size of the magnet you need to put in a motor is that much smaller. So you can make these compact really high efficiency motors that enable all sorts of things. Engineers measure the strength of magnets by how much magnetic energy you can pack into a material. An energy product measured as megagouse erstids.

Older steel magnets might measure only a few megagouse erstads. Now they're up towards 50, even 55 megagouse erstads. So we've got things that are factors of 10 and 20 better than what the best magnets are without rare earths. With their enhanced strength, these magnets can pack a bigger punch in a smaller package, enabling nearly every modern technological advancement from handheld devices to gigantic offshore turbines. For defense, our advanced fighters have tens of kilograms of these rare earth magnets that are important for all sorts of capabilities. You look at the motors in pretty much all the electric vehicles. There's a couple of kilograms of magnets in those. If you had to switch to another system,

those motors would be significantly larger and they would also be less efficient. Which raises a question. If rare earth materials matter this much and they're everywhere, what makes them hard to get? The 15 lanthanides are chemically almost the same element wearing 15 slightly different coats. They all tend to be trivalent. They're relatively similar in size these different elements. And those two things are what people usually use to chemically separate things. The properties chemists normally used to tell elements apart barely change from one rare earth element to the next. So instead of one clean separation, they may have to repeat the process again and again. You'll end up with many, many stages, maybe 15, and in some cases

maybe a couple of hundred stages to separate out these rare earths. Every additional stage adds more time and more equipment, as well as adding more chemistry to an already environmentally and economically challenging process. The actual separation of the rare earths and refining and processing of the rare earth. It uses a lot of strong acids, strong alkali. That makes it more expensive. The process works. It's just an incredibly inefficient way to separate elements that barely look different from one another. So the question became, could there be a more selective way? It turns out nature already had one. And it had been working on it for a very long time. There's a subset of bacteria that have evolved some pretty sophisticated pathways for mining rare earth elements from nature for use in their own metabolic function.

Dan Park is a synthetic biologist at Lawrence Livermore, studying nature's strange solution. They actually insert a rare earth into an enzyme that's important for carbon metabolism. The bacteria doesn't just tolerate rare earths. It uses rare earths to live. They do this really selectively and are even able to separate somewhere else from each other in this process. A 200-stage nightmare for scientists, circumvented by a microbe eating its breakfast. Somewhere in that breakfast routine is a protein called land modulent, and scientists discovered it almost by accident. This was a protein that was fortuitously discovered by one of our primary collaborators, Joseph Catrivo at Penn State. he was actually trying to purify another enzyme in the bacteria that hosts land modulin,

and it came down as an impurity. The selective rare earth-grabbing molecule showed up as a contaminant in someone else's experiment. Fortunately, the impact of the discovery stood out immediately when the paper was published, and the collaboration between Penn State and Lawrence Livermore on the protein began. Their mission? figure out how to turn nature's process into a mining tool. The setup is surprisingly simple. Let nature do the work.

Take the protein, attach it to a packed material, and send a mixture of metals through it. Then let land modulin decide what stays. We immobilize it on porous resin and we pack columns. We take a feedstock that's just a metal ion mixture and we flow it over the column and the protein captures the rare earth elements selectively. Most of the other metals wash through and the rare earths stick. Then you tune the acidity to narrow down which rare earths remain. Only this time you're not relying heavily on organic solvents.

One of the advantages of the bios separation approach that we're developing is it would be all aqueous and so we could eliminate the need. for organic solvents. Nature's version has one catch. There are thousands of these proteins scattered across the living world, and each one is slightly different. Finding the best one means the slow process of testing thousands of possibilities. What could take years to characterize hundreds or thousands we wanted to do in days.

That's the bottleneck, a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore set out to break, with a, well, let's say a spicy solution. Spicy lambs, there you go. Yeah, that's the clever acronym that a postdoc in my group, now staff scientist, Patrick Deep, came up with. Formerly, it stands for spide tag catcher immobilization of land modulin for assaying metal binding selectivity. But a chili pepper wielding lamb on a scientific paper is a bit more memorable. He actually has this trademarked logo of his lamb with a chili pepper that we put in the abstract of the manuscript.

The joke is memorable, but the speed is the breakthrough. Spicy Lambs uses a molecular pairing system called Spycatcher across plates divided into 96 tiny compartments called wells. We could produce a different protein in each well and then use this spycatcher system to pull that protein out onto resin and isolate it. So it avoided the protein purification step. And then we could then assay the selectivity of the protein. It's not fishing with a better rod.

It's more like casting a specialized net for the rare earths you want. Built from the protein spycatcher helps line up for testing. A shortcut around the purification step that lets them test proteins by the plateful. We can do about thousand to two thousand in a very busy week. More tests means more data. And Lawrence Livermore is aiming to design new proteins from it. With AIML-based approaches, we can start to do some, really interesting design, you can say, I'd like this part of the protein, like the coordination site,

but I want to try a completely different backbone. And it will design a completely different looking protein for you. Between the data and AI, the team can push beyond the designs evolution gave them. Toward rare earths nature's proteins don't naturally favor. Natural proteins tend to bind the light and middle rare earths. But if you want to shift across the lanthanite series and bind the most valuable heavies like terbium and dysprosium, you're going to have to design a protein for that role. But designing something nature never needed is one thing. Doing it well is another. We had a recent breakthrough where we think we've inverted the selectivity of the protein.

It was super exciting, and then we found out it was binding much weaker than the natural proteins. They'd changed what the protein preferred, but weakened its grip in the process, at least so far. Nature did it best. It's really hard to do better. Even if the designed proteins do improve, there's another problem waiting. Separating rare earths is only one link in a much longer chain. It's a delicate game when it comes to rare earths and permanent magnets. Without this mine, we would be 100% reliant for the magnets that are going to power the electrification of everything.

There is exactly one operating rare earth mine in the United States. Mountain Pass sits in the California desert just off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It didn't start mining for magnets. It started out mining for color television. The entire rare earth market back in the 50s was Europium, and that's because Europhrium offered the red phosphor that was becoming very popular in color television. The red in America's first color television sets came out of that desert. desert. And for decades, Mountain Pass helped make the United States a global leader in rare Earths. Then, slowly, the economics changed. Demand shifted and the domestic industry hollowed out.

The U.S. is in a periodic table chokehold. The world has become too dependent on a single source. The market is broken in the sense that there are no price signals which encourage investment in upstream mining. Every deposit around the world that has rare earths needs processing capacity. be common, but it's very hard to find in a form that's economically processed. We need rare earth. The United States didn't lack rare earth elements. Mountain Pass itself has some of the richest rare earth ore in the Western Hemisphere. Mountain Pass was the primary source of rare earths in the

world. But because they were essential to modern technology without being needed in enormous quantities, they occupied a strange economic position. The overall demand compared to something like steel or aluminum or copper is tiny. We're talking thousands of tons instead of millions of tons is the quantity that's needed. We could pull the rocks out of the ground. We just couldn't finish the job at home. Mount Pass mine for quite a while was actually exporting their concentrate to China for processing before bringing it back. So there's an entire supply chain that has kind of atrophied in the United States. This is the gap Lawrence Livermore is trying to close. In 2024, Lawrence Livermore, Livermore joined eight other national laboratories to launch Metallic, a collaborative program

led by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The critical minerals and materials supply chain research facility and were there to help accelerate critical materials technology from the bench scale to the pilot scale. Metallic gave Lawrence Livermore a way to look past rare earth separation and into the rest of the supply chain needed to make those materials useful. One of the first problems waiting there is an economic challenge. The rare earths that come out of a mine are not all equally valuable. Every scoop from Mountain Pass was heavy with the rare earth worth far less than what miners

were really after. There's a tremendous amount of serum produced in Mountain Pass, but the value for it is quite low. Typically a dollar a kilogram for the oxide, whereas the Neodanyum may be $100. Serium was still a rare earth material, but it wasn't powering electric cars like a neodymium. So Scott's team asked a different question. What if you could invent a reason to want it? We're involved in doing the alloy design, figuring out what phases would form, how to actually put the serum in and get the right microstructure at the end. They built a new aluminum

cyrium alloy that was strong, worked at higher temperatures than many aluminum alloys, and resisted corrosion. And it's already out in the world, shaped into turbine blades for small-scale hydropower, forged to a precise finished shape so a river can spin it for years. The challenge for Syriam was finding a reason to use it more. For another rare earth element, the challenge was finding places where they could use less. Turbium was locked into making the green glow of television screens. The rare earth could be used elsewhere, but demands kept much of it tied to a single purpose. They were able to come up with some very promising substitute

phosphors that didn't require the rare earth. Suddenly that freed up the turbium, which thing could be used in a magnet or some other critical application where it's much harder to substitute. Take the pressure off in one place. The scarce material flows to applications where nothing else will do. Better uses and smarter substitutes can ease pressure

at the end of the supply chain. But upstream, Lawrence Livermore's protein based separation technology still has to prove it can scale. We need to actually demonstrate that we can separate rare earth at scale. So we've done milligram, we've done gram-level separations, can we do kilogram separations using this process? You can prove a recipe works in the kitchen and still fail to feed a stadium. I definitely don't sleep as well as I used to.

As we've been responsible are on the hook to produce kilogram scale of the protein. Dan's team was tasked with a first of its kind, pilot. plant at Lawrence Livermore. We haven't done anything like this before, but it's also really exciting. We now get to work with a pretty diverse group of folks across the lab, so we're bringing in material scientists and chemical engineers, mechanical engineers. The separation work was also starting to find a path into industry. Soon after Lawrence Livermore and Penn State had published one of their first demonstrations of land modulin,

Nathan Ratledge was finishing his PhD at Stanford. He was nearby, thinking about sort of the next opportunity and I think stumbled across one of our first separation papers. Ratledge would go on to build Alta Resource Technologies, which later licensed the land modulent technology from Lawrence Livermore in Penn State, creating another path for their research to move from laboratory scale science toward industrial use. All of this work is headed towards a process larger than a single mine, going further than a single product. It is rebuilding an entire supply chain on home soil. I hope that we have multiple producers of rare earth ores and concentrates. I would like to see a number of capabilities for actually refining and processing it,

multiple magnet makers. The same separation tools that work on ore could also recover rare earths from the things we've already made. There's a lot of hard disk drives that are being tossed out every month. And they're shredded because we want to have data security. But within that, there's a small amount of rare earth. but there's a whole lot of hard drives where we can start looking for recycling of rare earths. A single hard drive only contains a small amount of rare earth material.

But across millions of discarded electronics, those small amounts begin to add up. Widen the range of materials the process can handle, and the discarded technology starts to look less like waste and more like another domestic source. One reason this work can move across so many parts of the supply chain is that the expertise Ortiz often sits just down the hall. There's just sort of this team-focused mantra. People are really open to collaboration. Enjoy working on big projects together.

And there's folks who have worked on lanthanite-actinide separations for a number of national security reasons. And we can pull them in and learn new things that we didn't know beforehand. Chemists next to physicists, next to engineers. And now economists and anthropologists, too. All asking whether a community will even want a mine before you build one. From mining to separations to manufacturing magnets,

rare earth elements go through a process that can require hundreds of complicated stages. The work at Lawrence Livermore is changing that equation. Finding new ways to separate rare earths, make better use of the materials we already produce, and recover more of them from the things we've already made. It's the same lesson that transformed aluminum more than a century ago, a material that may not need to change, but our process can. What can we do differently? How can we use materials in new ways?

And where can we find new inspiration? Even if it's in a process, billions of years old. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.