Deep in the chiseled, rugged steppes of Lemhi Pass in the Beaverhead Mountains — a portion of the Bitterroot Range that straddles the border of Idaho and Montana — lies the Last Chance mine.
In the 1950s, the Last Chance was first worked as part of the US Defense Department’s Minerals Exploration Administration. But by the 1980s, anything of interest to the military had been long been removed from the Last Chance and it has remained essentially vacant and forgotten about … until now.
US Rare Earths — a domestic mineral exploration company headquartered in Plano, Texas — recently announced that it has received approval from the US Forest Service to reopen the northern tunnel of the Last Chance and conduct metallurgical sampling.
What are they looking for? This time, it’s not plutonium or uranium. It’s Europium.
Europi-WHAT?
During the Cold War, miners at the Last Chance worked veins seeking the element thorium, which decays into uranium-233, a fissionable material used to produce nuclear power.
Today, however, US Rare Earths is returning to the mines because of smart phones.
The rare earth Europium is used to provide colors for such things as smart phones and energy-saving CFL light bulbs. It has red and blue phosphors and is also used in lasers, mercury-vapor lamps, fluorescent lamps and as a nuclear magnetic resonance relaxing agent.
Rare Earth, and Valuable, Too!
Kevin Cassidy, US Rare Earth’s CEO, said his company is hoping that there is money buried under those mountains in the form of Europium.
“Our highly qualified team is now removing the stockpile after which we intend to perform metallurgical testing to confirm historical data,” Cassidy said in a company news release. “We believe results will confirm that material from the Last Chance project is rich in Europium, a rare earth essential in providing the colors used in applications such as smart phones and CFL bulbs.
“Europium pricing has been one of the very few rare earth elements which have maintained a consistently high price,” Cassidy said. “We believe we are well underway of executing our strategy of providing a complete domestic supply chain solution of rare earths which are made in America.”
In additional to Europium, samples from the Last Chance vein also have shown significant grade percentages of the earth elements dysprosium (used in magnets and lasers), terbium (used in flourescent lamps and lasers), neodymium (used to crate violet colors in glass and ceramics, also lasers) and yttrium (used in microwave filters, energy-efficient light bulbs, spark plugs and as an additive to steel), in addition to Total Rare Earth Oxides.
Geographical Advantage
While the Last Chance mine isn’t easily accessible, when it comes to rare earth mining, it may as well be beneath 52nd and Broadway.
“The Lemhi Pass are is located within the contintental US and perfectly positioned to supply US critical rare earth demand,” Cassidy said in October of last year. “Our properties are not on a remote island, in the Alaskan or Canadian tundra, and certain not in remote regions of the globe, where logistics and government policies make current rare earth mining efforts highly unfavorable. At a basic level, we intend to further capitalize our resource rich properties by creating US based intellectual property for (rare earth oxides) separation and production in an environmentally friendly way.”