NE Wyoming, war machine enjoying socialist rare earth development

In January of 2016, the US Forest Service suspended the Draft Environmental Impact Study for a Wyoming Black Hills mountaintop-removal mine that would extract more minerals containing lanthanides like neodymium and praseodymium from the Belle Fourche watershed.

In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine just upstream of the South Dakota border in the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells.

A demonstration-scale separation and processing plant is expected to cost $35-40 million and a site in Upton, Wyoming near the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) was confirmed in 2021 as the location for the facility. Now, the EIS is complete and the US Department of Energy is pouring some $22 million more into northeast Wyoming.

The demo plant represents the next step of RER’s journey towards operating a rare earth mine and processing plant, with the mine itself in the Bear Lodge Mountains just outside Sundance. It will further test the company’s proprietary extraction technology, and the data from this test will be used to design and complete an economic evaluation for a full-size commercial plant, as well as the Bear Lodge Project mine site. [Reviews complete for RER demo plant]

General Atomics gives generously to Republicans including former US Representative from New Mexico's First District and South Dakota School of Mines President Heather Wilson.