I find this assertion very far fetched.
First, we do not have significant deposits of rare earth elements, as far as I know.
Second, it would take (as other posters have stated) lotsa years of enviro lawsuits to open any such mine.
Third, rare earths are, uhhh, rare. Very rare. Prevalence in the earth’s crust in the ten-thousandths and hundred-thousandths of a given weight. At the point where these minerals are 5 or 10 or 100x as costly as gold, they are not going to form the foundation of anything approaching economic viability.
Calls for “free market” are all well and good, but lacking a Chinese source for these elements puts them out of the range of commercial viability. Sure, speculators and mine owners will become filthy rich, perhaps, if they can get past the enviro concerns and open a mine. But if our flat screens end up quadrupling or octupling in price it won’t be a happy condition. On the other hand, we don’t make any of that stuff here anyway. Another source will just have to be found. I think Russia has decent deposits of REs. Heh.
Now for sure, a mine doesn’t just extract one mineral. For example, virtually all large silver mines are actually copper, zinc, and tin mines with silver (and some gold) as byproducts. So there’s that. But no mine is going to open just as a source of these rare minerals. At the point where they are too expensive to extract, it will still be cheaper to buy them from the Chinese. IMHO.
The fact that rare earths have been so cheap from countries like China, where no environmental restrictions apply, has meant there has been no exploration for deposits in the USA for years. Geologists don’t sit around waiting for the next boom to occur, they go into other careers.
You may find this interesting:
World Resources: Rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust, but discovered minable concentrations are less common than for most other ores. U.S. and world resources are contained primarily in bastnäsite and monazite. Bastnäsite deposits in China and the United States constitute the largest percentage of the world’s rare-earth economic resources, while monazite deposits in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the United States constitute the second largest segment. Apatite, cheralite, eudialyte, loparite, phosphorites, rare-earth-bearing (ion adsorption) clays, secondary monazite, spent uranium solutions, and xenotime make up most of the remaining resources. Undiscovered resources are thought to be very large relative to expected demand.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2010-raree.pdf
The name rare earths is a misnomer because they are not all that rare. It is just that you seldom find commercial grade deposits of elements that so readily substitute into other minerals. A mineral deposit is a freak occurrence in nature because normally earth processes disperse elements, not concentrate them. For instance, gold is everywhere in the earth’s crust and water, but seldom in concentrations that allow economic production.