The United States doesn’t lack rare earth minerals.
It doesn’t lack engineering talent.
It doesn’t even lack the ability to process critical materials quickly.

What it lacks is permission.

In the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, hosts Sam Stone and Chuck Warren continue their conversation with Dr. Meg Reiss, founder and CEO of Solid Intel, digging deeper into the single biggest obstacle standing between America and supply chain independence: time — and the regulatory maze that consumes it.

The contrast Dr. Reiss lays out is stark.

China: Two Years. America: Ten (If You’re Lucky)

According to Dr. Reiss, under current conditions:

  • China can bring a mine online in roughly two years

  • The United States often needs 10+ years just to open a mine

  • Processing infrastructure itself can be built quickly — but permitting delays can stretch that timeline another 2 to 7 years

In other words, something that should take two years in the U.S. can take a decade — or never happen at all.

The reason isn’t technical capability.
It’s procedural paralysis.

Processing Can Move Fast — Reviews Cannot

One of the most important clarifications in this part of the conversation is that processing rare earths is not the hard part.

America knows how to do it.
America can do it quickly.

What slows everything down is the endless sequence of environmental reviews, restrictions, and legal challenges that pile up after the engineering questions have already been answered.

Even projects that meet standards and pass initial reviews are often delayed for years due to overlapping requirements and repeated challenges.

The Lawsuit Loop

Sam Stone points out another reality often left out of policy discussions: even approved projects are vulnerable to years of litigation.

Environmental lawsuits can stall or kill projects long after planning is complete — creating uncertainty that discourages private investment and makes “surging production” nearly impossible.

As Stone notes, projects don’t just face regulation — they face an endless defensive battle.

The Minerals We Already Have — and Can’t Touch

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the conversation centers on existing mining sites.

Across the country, there are:

  • Closed or semi-closed mines

  • Piles of slag from decades of operations

  • Locations already known to contain rare earth and critical minerals

Many of these sites have already undergone environmental reviews in the past.

Yet once a mine closes, federal oversight often locks down access — making reprocessing and extraction from existing material some of the hardest projects to approve.

Dr. Reiss argues that these locations represent an obvious opportunity to restart production quickly — if the government allows it.

Permit Once, Produce When Needed

Dr. Reiss outlines a practical solution: surge-ready sites.

Instead of forcing companies to restart the entire review process over and over, the government should:

  • Recognize prior environmental approvals

  • Limit duplicative reviews

  • Allow concurrent permitting

  • Enable production surges when supply chains are under stress

This approach mirrors how America treats other strategic assets — and reflects the intent behind recent executive orders aimed at expedited permitting.

Mining by Right, Not by Delay

Sam Stone raises a question many in the industry have been asking for years:
Why not designate specific areas as open mining zones, where projects can proceed by right — similar to zoning for construction?

Dr. Reiss agrees emphatically.

Most of these sites have already been reviewed. Requiring repeated approvals doesn’t increase safety — it increases delay.

The result is a system where America has the resources and know-how, but not the regulatory flexibility to act when it matters.

The Real Bottleneck

The takeaway from this segment of Breaking Battlegrounds is clear:

America’s rare earth problem is not geological.
It’s not technological.
It’s not even financial.

It’s procedural.

Until permitting timelines match strategic urgency, the U.S. will continue to rely on adversaries for materials essential to defense, energy, and advanced technology.

Transcript

Chuck Warren: We’re with Dr. Meg Reiss. So let’s give an example. Let’s say we find whatever rare earth mineral in China and the United States. How long does it take China to mine and process that under current management versus the United States? What’s the time difference?

Dr. Meg Reiss: Oh gosh, this is going to sound really depressing. Let’s say it takes two-ish years to get a mine online in China, 10 plus years to bring a mine online in the US, and then two years to build up the processing capabilities, which is fast, you guys. We can do processing very fast, but expect that there are going to be years, two to five to seven years of environmental reviews, restrictions, basically pushback for the processing.

So something that should really only take two years to bring online could take 10, even though the capabilities, the technical capabilities to restart processing is really fast.

**Sam Stone: **Well, and that’s if it happens because you’re just going to have an endless series of environmental lawsuits along the way that you have to bat back. One of the things, Dr. Reiss , that I’ve had conversations with some of my friends here who in Arizona who are involved in the mining industry say is they say, look, we have piles of slag for mining operations around the country over that, you know, 100 plus years now.

And those are full of these type of minerals. And we could just go back and start extracting that and refining those. And yet they say those are actually some of the hardest stores to get at because once a mine closes, the federal government does all over it for its cleanup and control a lot of access.

**Dr. Meg Reiss: **Yeah. And what I think needs to happen is these have gone, a lot of these sites have gone through environmental reviews before, which means that they’ve already been permitted at some point. So they’ve gone into these essentially temporary status of they’re not totally offline, but they’re mostly offline.

We need to be able to surge production at these particular sites. There are actually a number of different categories of locations where, honestly, I think the government needs to be able to go in and say, we’ve done some initial reviews. We should be able to limit some of these pushback against environmental reviews and then do them either concurrently or make sure that they’re already in place so you don’t need to go through these processes and just start surging processing at these sites.

Sam Stone: Obviously there’s always some sort of engineering challenges around mining, much like we are doing and talking about in zoning for construction, shouldn’t we simply designate areas as open mining areas where you don’t have to go through this extensive process where it’s a buy right mining ability?

Dr. Meg Reiss: I a thousand percent agree with you. And honestly, a lot of these sites have the reason why these this idea I think is a very good one is for the most part, these sites have gone through these reviews in the past. You don’t need to restart the process. You don’t need to have concurrent reviews happen over and over and over. And that’s what the Trump EO is trying to get at is to get these expedited permitting permits in place.

So that companies can restart these processes very, quickly. It’s not the technical know-how that the US lacks. It’s the ability to surge production based on the permitting issues in place.

Sam Stone: We’re great at getting things done. We’re just not good at telling Greenpeace no.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!