In the summer of 1942, the U.S. government launched the Manhattan Project. The science was ready. The money was there. The problem was people.

The country needed physicists and chemists who understood nuclear fission. There were maybe a few hundred on the planet. So Washington went and recruited every single one it could find. It pulled teachers out of classrooms, scientists out of labs, even lured experts away from allies.

Three years and $2 billion later, the bomb worked. But it only worked because the people came first.

Eighty-four years later, the U.S. is trying to build a rare earth supply chain from scratch. And this time it is doing it backward.

More than $10 billion in public and private capital has been committed to rare earth mines and magnet plants. USA Rare Earth broke ground on a $1.2 billion factory in South Carolina this month. MP Materials says its Texas campus is now vertical. Energy Fuels is building a heavy rare earth line in Utah.

But a MINING.COM report last week found a problem. The country graduates just 285 mining and mineral engineers a year. That's less than half the 600 the Department of Energy says it needs. It's about a fifteenth of China's output.

That gap matters because the plants are on a clock. The South Carolina factory and the Texas campus both plan to start making magnets in 2028. A freshman who enrolled at Colorado School of Mines this fall won't graduate until 2030.

And the pipeline has been shrinking for decades. The U.S. had 25 mining engineering programs in the 1980s. Today there are 14. Meanwhile, 221,000 mining workers are expected to retire by 2029 — more than half the workforce.

China treats the talent as seriously as the ore. At least 11 Chinese universities run rare earth degree programs, with over 500 students each year. No Western school offers anything like it.

And on September 15, State Council Decree No. 841 took effect. It gives Beijing the power to bar Chinese citizens from leaving the country if they breach export control or technology trade rules, or if they may endanger national industrial or technological security. Rare earths are squarely in that zone.

Constantine Karayannopoulos, former CEO of Neo Performance Materials, told Reuters that in China he could hire grads who were useful on day one. Anywhere else, he said, he needs three years to train them.

The DOE's PROSPECT Planning Prize — $16 million for schools that can double their output of mining grads — closes on October 5. Five days from now. The bigger $100 million PROSPECT program behind it hasn't been funded yet. Congress has to pass a spending bill by December 11 or the money dies.

Retired Gen. Charles Flynn, who ran U.S. Army Pacific, summed up the problem in July. About 90% of the raw material mined at home still goes abroad for refining, he said. The people who know how to do the middle steps don't exist here yet.

The goal for the year was 3,000 retail shelves.

They passed it four months early.

Walgreens just went live in 1,700 locations. Target went from 55 stores to over 300. The coffee now sits in Harris Teeter and 130+ grocery chains across 21 states.

Hundreds more stores are already in the works.

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The U.S. Army picked Vulcan Elements to supply neodymium iron boron magnets for its SkyFoundry program, which aims to mass-produce small drones on American soil. It's Vulcan's tenth Defense Department contract. CEO John Maslin told Axios the company won because it is fully decoupled from Chinese supply.

Vulcan is building a 1.1-million-square-foot plant in Benson, North Carolina, backed by a $620 million federal loan. The magnets will power brushless motors in drones the Army wants to field fast, after watching them reshape war in Eastern Europe.

State Council Decree No. 841 took effect on September 15. It gives Beijing the power to stop citizens from leaving the country if they breach export control or technology trade rules, or if they may endanger national industrial or technological security. The decree sets no time limit on the bans. It doesn't name rare earths by name.

But experts told Asia Times it is aimed at sectors where China already restricts exports — rare earths, batteries, and magnets among them. Beijing banned the export of rare earth separation tech in 2023. Now it's locking down the people who know how.

Resource Recycling published a piece this week showing that only a handful of rare earth recycling sources are worth the cost at current prices. Hard disk drives, wind turbine magnets, and EV motors contain enough neodymium and dysprosium to justify the cost of pulling them apart. But most consumer electronics — phones, earbuds, small speakers — hold such tiny amounts that the chemistry costs more than the metal is worth. The piece comes as Cyclic Materials ramps its new Arizona plant and Geomega nears startup in Quebec, both betting that rising prices and defense demand will close the gap.

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The PROSPECT Planning Prize offers up to $1 million each to mining programs that submit plans to double their graduate count within two years. The deadline is five days away.

— DOE / MINING.COM

Shanghai Metals Market's weekly review for the week ending September 26 showed PrNd oxide prices rising slightly, driven by large plants entering the market to purchase and news-driven factors. Dysprosium, terbium, gadolinium, and holmium stayed flat or fell. Trading volumes remain thin ahead of China's Golden Week holiday, which begins tomorrow and runs through October 7.

— Shanghai Metals Market

A MINING.COM report found that development finance for mines and plants is growing fast, but funding for transparency and community oversight in mining regions is being cut. The gap risks repeating mistakes from earlier commodity booms.

— MINING.COM

The Rare Earth Mines, Magnets & Motors 2026 conference runs its final day today in Toronto. The four-day event drew mine operators, magnet makers, and automakers. NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman delivered the opening keynote on Sunday.

— Adamas