See below even if Russia ever gets to the point of a decision to mine, its a long shot and Russia would not likely consider selling much of the NB to the rest of the world LOL. The weather alone would make this a 10 year out project. No worries on this one.
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Jack Lifton on
October 8, 2015 at 6:38 PM said:
I have been hearing this story for decades. When the Soviet Union equipped the titanium/niobium/tantalum facility in Estonia at Silimae to separate light rare earths by solvent extraction it was planned to obtain the mineral concentrates of loparite from the Lovozero mine, after they had been extracted and separated as a mixed concentrate at the Solikamsk Magnesium Works. This was done for many years and Silmet, as it came to be called, was the Soviet Union’s source of light rare earths. I believe that didymium metal was also produced there or at Solikamsk for use in NdFeB magnets. Silmet had a capacity of 1000-2000 tons per year and as a Soviet style business had 550 employees to do so; this was about 3-4 times as many as there would be in a modern SX plant of the same capacity. Silmet was “privatized” when the Soviet Union collapsed, and ultimately was bought by Molycorp, which didn’t realize how obsolete it was.
As for Tomtor it has been marketed as the world’s highest grade highest volume rare earth deposit for the last few decades.
The last time I heard anything about it the Russian State Company, we know as Uranium One, was going to develop it. Note that I was told that Tomtor gets to 50 degrees below zero air temperature in the winter.
Russian projects lack the ability to generate trust among global investors, so that only a Russian would invest in such a venture.
No Russian venture will come to pass in any time frame or for any budget that I have seen in this report.
Jack Lifton
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