Head north on 15 toward Las Vegas and just before you enter Nevada at Mountain Pass there's a huge open pit mine for rare earth metals. I worked on the Phoenix Project there when the owners were reopening the mine which had sort of been idle when the Chinese began flooding the market.
Yes, the Mountain Pass mine was the world's source for Europium, used as the red phosphor in CRTs. That's kind of not a thing anymore.
I worked there and that's not the only thing they mine now. Maybe you're behind on your information? A mining engineer showed us various rocks they were mining, pointed out how you can see which types are rich in rare earth metals and explained to us how the tanks we were building were used to process ground up rocks with acid to dissolve rare earth metals. We were also shown the huge bags of concentrate ready to ship out for further processing. So ya, you're a bit behind in your information.
Yes, MP produced many rare earths. However, it was the source for Europium, and some CRTs actually proudly displayed the fact that they had red phosphor from that mine.
I'm not sure how that is being behind in information, unless you were taking my statement of "that's kind of not a thing now" to mean that was the only thing they produced.
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