The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility: There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money." Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily. In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking...> Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For a truck with a 500-mile range and an estimated battery pack of around 800-900 kWh, that requires an incredibly high power output, well beyond the 250 kW or even 350 kW we see on passenger EVs in North America. Today, the official Tesla Semi account on X released a video showing exactly that. In the video, Tesla engineers are seen monitoring a charging session where the power output climbs to a peak of 1.2 MW (1,206 kW). This is consistent with the capabilities Tesla announced for its new V4 Cabinet architecture earlier this year. The V4 cabinets are designed to support 400V-1000V vehicle architectures and can deliver up to 500 kW for cars (like the Cybertruck) and up to 1.2 MW for the Semi. There is some information missing from the video. For example, we don't see the state-of-charge of the truck, so we don't at what battery percentage Tesla Semi can achieve and maintain this charge rate. Peak speed is one thing, but sustaining that power without overheating the pack or the cable is the real challenge. The liquid-cooled charging cable and the immersion-cooled connector (part of the Megawatt Charging System or a high-power proprietary Tesla solution, though Tesla has been leaning toward MCS compatibility) seem to be doing their job.... This comes just as Tesla is gearing up for volume production of the Semi at its new factory expansion near Gigafactory Nevada. The automaker is targeting a start of production in the first half of 2026 and a ramp up to volume production in the second half.

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