Rarely a week went by in 2025 without some newsworthy development related to rare earth elements, magnets, and electric motors. IEEE Spectrum was on top of the big ones, starting with the production of industrial quantities of the rare-earth oxides of neodymium and praseodymium at the Mountain Pass mine and processing facilities in California’s Mojave desert.
Between 1965 and the mid 1980s, the Mountain Pass mine produced as much as 70 percent of the world’s annual supply of rare earths, which are…
