Authored by Eva Fu & Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

One flash is all it takes.

That’s how James Tour said the United States can tackle China’s rare earth dominance.

James Tour, chemist and nanotechnologist at Houston’s Rice University, in Scottsdale, Ariz

All he needs is discarded electronics—of which the United States has mountains. And from these scraps, the Rice University chemist and nanotechnologist has pioneered a way to quickly extract rare earth metals.

“We can pull out one metal and then the next,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s really that simple.”

Tour’s solution is flash Joule heating: rapidly heating up the materials to thousands of degrees to vaporize the metals. Mixed with chlorine gas, the vapors turn into chlorides that emerge at different temperatures.

Just like in an incandescent light bulb, the technique works by passing an electric current through the raw material, Tour said. But whereas the former channels a steady electric current to create a perpetual glow, in treating metals, the energy arrives in short bursts, dialing up heat in milliseconds.

“Metals are infinitely recyclable,” he said.

And whereas the traditional way of distilling metals is rather “messy,” Tour said, what he proposes is all about simplicity—“you flash and you’re done.”

Speed is now more critical than ever. The United States is racing against time to reshore rare earth production, spurred in part by China’s October threat to dramatically curtail access.

With a one-year truce in hand, Washington now has a short window to close the gap. Getting a mine up and running can take 15 years.

Tour said his technology would put the United States on a faster track.

“It would give us a map to get independent,” he said.

“You can get these things going for a few tens of millions of dollars. That’s not very much when it comes to this type of manufacturing.”

A flash Joule heating process developed at Rice University recovers valuable metals from electronic waste. The process allows for “urban mining” of resources. Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

US Dominance Lost to China

Rare earths, a subgroup of 17 critical minerals, are essential components in electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and missiles.

China currently sits at the center of this vital global production chain. It makes more than 90 percent of the world’s rare earth magnets, according to International Energy Agency data. China is also the sole supplier for certain elements, such as samarium, used in fighter jets and nuclear reactors for its high heat resistance.

This dominance comes from decades of strategic investment, lavish state subsidies, and aggressive market manipulation that stifled foreign competition.

Decisions made in the United States also played a part.

Until 1991, the country was a leading producer of rare earth minerals; the Mountain Pass mine in California supplied most of the world. Environmental troubles then shuttered the mine for years at the same time China began to gain a foothold.

Against the Pentagon’s objections, the U.S. government greenlit the 1995 sale of Magnequench, then the industry leader in rare earth magnets, to a Chinese front group, effectively handing over critical defense technology and manufacturing to China.

In 2004, Magnequench closed its Indiana plant and moved operations to China. Beijing started taxing exports of rare earth minerals the following year.

Twenty years later, the United States is beholden to Chinese minerals.

“We didn’t realize that we were selling something that turned out to be very important to our country,” Tour said.

The Mountain Pass mine is an open-pit mine of rare earth elements in California. NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Waste to Treasure

As early as 1976, the United States had a law regulating electronic waste disposal.

In the years that followed, the ballooning electronic waste created a whole recycling industry that still struggles to catch up. It’s now the fastest-growing type of waste, rising five times faster than recycling, according to the United Nations.

The United States produced 7.2 million tons of electronic waste in 2022—about one-eighth of the world’s total, the latest U.N. data show. That’s about 46 pounds for every American.

“We have these mountains of tailings that we can access, and we have these constant mountains of printed circuit boards,” Tour said.

Tour said that their method could clean up this spiraling nightmare of waste sites and turn it into a “treasure.”

Lucas Eddy, technology development manager for Metallium’s Texas subsidiary Flash Metals USA, said he is now seeing the idea being put into practice.

“The real reason a waste product is a waste product isn’t because it’s bad, it’s because it can’t be used,” he told The Epoch Times.

Here’s where flash Joule heating shines, according to Eddy, whose Texas factory has licensed the method for metal recovery.

Old Tech Reimagined

Joule heating—passing an electric current through a conductor to produce heat—has been around since the 1840s. It’s now an integral feature of every household, in toasters, electric heaters, ovens, and hair dryers.

Until now, no one had thought to use it for electronic waste.

The spark for Tour’s team began with reading a scientific paper describing using the flash Joule heating technique to make metallic nanoparticles.

The researchers tested the technique on carbon and found that it was a quick way to make high-quality graphene at low cost. They next began exploring its potential in extracting the much-needed rare earth metals.

Eddy, a 2025 Tour lab graduate, joined the project in early 2021 just as this shift began.

“It’s really live chemistry in action,” he said. “You see a rainbow of colors coming off.”

The innovative research builds on Tour’s 2020 development of waste disposal and upcycling applications using flash Joule heating.

Each change of color represents one metal element that has separated out. Rare earths, usually with some of the highest boiling points, tend to come out last—often as a white powder, he said.

The project drew interest from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which asked them to make it more industrially applicable, Tour said. Under a federal contract, the team worked on lowering boiling points, experimenting with fluorides and chlorine in various forms, and eventually settled on chlorine gas.

That step was “revolutionary,” Eddy said.

Read the rest here…

Israeli President Isaac Herzog acknowledged this week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request for a pardon in his corruption trial is generating significant debate and division within Israeli society. Herzog said that Netanyahu’s formal petition for the charges and case to be dismissed “will be addressed with full care and precision,” and pledged his decision will be guided solely by “the good of the state and Israeli society.”

He in the Monday comments admitted that Netanyahu’s move “unsettles many people across different sectors of the public and has sparked considerable debate.”

TOI/Flash90

But Herzog tried to calm rising public anger, dismissing aggressive or heated public discourse as having “no impact” on his judgment.

PM Netanyahu formally submitted the pardon request to Herzog on Sunday, sparking opposition backlash demanding that the president quickly shoot it down. Local media says that Netanyahu’s request immediately unleashed a firestorm of controversy, as it was accompanied with another denial that’s he’s guilty:

As if the country were not already laboring under enough legal and constitutional crises, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took Israel into a new minefield on Sunday when he filed a request to President Isaac Herzog asking for a pardon for the criminal charges against him in the three cases for which he is currently standing trial.

In a brief, personal letter to Herzog, Netanyahu made the case that bringing the trial to a close would benefit the public by ending national divisions over his prosecution.

He then published a message pledging to heal the nation’s divides should his trial be halted, but in the same breath enflamed the rift by arguing that not only is he innocent but that the he’d been framed and the indictment against him was concocted by hostile elements in law enforcement agencies.

Indeed he took the denial further by saying he’d been ‘framed’ by his political enemies. Thus if Herzog were to suddenly go along with dismissing the case, outrage among the opposition as well as long-running anti-Netanyahu protests in the streets related to handling the hostage crisis in Gaza would explode.

Times of Israel concludes of the dilemma, “Rather, experts say, it is Netanyahu’s glaring omission of an admission of guilt or wrongdoing that puts his request on legally shaky ground, making it highly unlikely that president will grant him an outright pass, and inviting the possibility of court intervention if he does.”

Back in January, Netanyahu began interrogation sessions connected to a series of cases – all of which he’s asserted his innocence in. For a review:

Case 1000 concerns allegations that Netanyahu and his wife accepted luxury gifts, such as cigars and champagne, from wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favors.
Case 2000 involves claims that Netanyahu negotiated with Arnon Mozes, publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth, to secure more favorable press coverage.
Case 4000 — viewed as the most serious — centers on accusations that Netanyahu provided regulatory and financial benefits to Shaul Elovitch, the former owner of the Walla news site and Bezeq telecommunications, in return for positive media treatment.

Netanyahu has also long faced accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity – but pressure over this has mainly been on the international and European front, related to international criminal court probes. President Trump has still firmly had his back, and has weighed in vocally in the case, asking Israel to dismiss all charges.

Republicans will hold onto Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District despite a push by Democrats to flip the deep-red seat, the Associated Press projected Tuesday, as Republican candidate Matt Van Epps was set to defeat Democrat Aftyn Behn.

The former state commissioner and Army helicopter pilot defeated the Democratic nominee, Aftyn Behn, with 53.9 percent of the vote in the highly publicized race, according to The Associated Press as of 9:45 p.m. ET. Behn had 45.1 percent, with nearly all votes counted. 

The high-stakes election was neck and neck ahead of election day, as an Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released on Nov. 26 showed Epps slightly ahead with 48 percent of voter support in the district and Behn with 46 percent. As always, the highly biased, vote suppressing poll came out largely in favor of the Democrat who is set to lose by almost 10 points. 

Tuesday’s special election, held after the resignation of Republican Rep. Mark Green, drew nationwide attention and was widely viewed as a referendum on President Trump. The president endorsed Van Epps during the primaries, participated in a phone rally for the GOP candidate on the eve of the election and congratulated him on Tuesday evening.

More than 43,000 ballots were submitted during the early voting period, according to the Tennessee Division of Elections.

The congressman-elect, originally from Ohio, will represent 14 counties in Middle Tennessee—including downtown Nashville—after the seat was left vacant by Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who retired over the summer to take a job in the private sector.

Tuesday night’s win in the Deep South, which President Donald Trump won by more than 20 points in 2024, helps the Republicans maintain hold of their slim majority in the U.S. House, which is expected to shrink once again on Jan. 5, 2026, when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) resigns. Before the Trump-endorsed candidate was elected, the 119th Congress had 219 Republicans, 213 Democrats, and three vacancies.

The result is a boon for Trump and his party, which had worried that its narrow House majority would grow even slimmer. But the relatively tight margin in such a deep-red district nonetheless represents a warning shot about the party’s vulnerabilities heading into the 2026 midterm elections. 

Trump carried the seat by 22 percentage points a little over a year ago. The Seventh Congressional District, which stretches from Kentucky to Alabama and includes part of downtown Nashville, had been drawn by G.O.P. state lawmakers specifically to elect a Republican.

As the Epoch Times reports, Epps’s win comes after the GOP flooded Tennessee with a multi-county, boots-on-the-ground effort to gain as much support as possible in the 24 hours ahead of the election.

On Monday, Epps headlined a morning rally in Franklin and an evening rally in Clarksville, which featured appearances by party powerhouses such as Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson (R-La.), Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Epps’s win comes after the GOP flooded Tennessee with a multi-county, boots-on-the-ground effort to gain as much support as possible in the 24 hours ahead of the election.

On Monday, Epps headlined a morning rally in Franklin and an evening rally in Clarksville, which featured appearances by party powerhouses such as Speaker of the U.S. House Mike Johnson (R-La.), Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

Epps promised to advance Trump’s MAGA agenda, fix the economy, bring manufacturing back to America, secure borders, keep transgender athletes out of women’s sports, and protect farmers.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has floated an unusual but very creative plan to quickly expand U.S. grid capacity: tapping the industrial diesel generators already sitting at data centers, big-box retailers, and other commercial sites. The proposal comes as multiple regional grids strain under the explosive power demand driven by the data-center boom. Leveraging these idled generators could serve as a short-term bridge until new generation comes online.

Bloomberg quoted Wright on Tuesday morning at the North American Gas Forum in Washington, where he said that tapping the nation’s idled fleet of industrial diesel generators could add the equivalent of about 35 nuclear power plants’ worth of electricity and help bridge the country until new natural-gas and nuclear generation comes online in the coming years.

Wright emphasized the scale of the opportunity, saying, “We’re going to unleash that 35 gigawatts of capacity that sits there today,” though he noted that pollution rules have historically limited generator use.

He argued that the massive data-center buildout over the next few years could be primarily supported by these existing generators, avoiding the need for dozens of new power plants.

These generators, he said, are already deployed at data centers and commercial sites nationwide. “They’re all around the country. It’s going to start with communicating to everyone that these assets exist.”

Wright and the Trump administration understand that power grids are stretched thin in the era of data centers. The push for dispatchable backup generation is a short-term solution for all the missing power needed for the AI boom…

Wow:

“In 2025-28, we project ~57 gigawatts (GW) of US data center power demand, and we quantify available power capacity to serve this demand as: near-term grid access of ~12-15 GW, plus ~6 GW of data centers under construction, resulting in a ~36 GW shortfall of US power… pic.twitter.com/4PArdYY9qO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2024

Perhaps by the time the 2030s arrive, new natural-gas generators and other reliable sources will finally add enough capacity to meet booming demand. Nuclear remains more of a next-decade story. And now, Wright may truly be onto something.