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The story
News that 50 tons of rare-earth-bearing mud had been successfully recovered from the seabed off Minamitorishima became a hot topic on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (general live-news) board. While some praised the technical feat of hauling material up from 6,000 meters below the seafloor, plenty of others questioned whether it makes financial sense, with comments like “This’ll cost a hundred times more than just buying from China.”
The thread also saw back-and-forth over whether the mud contains radioactive material and where it would even be refined, leaving the discussion pretty split.
What people said
Because their radioactivity is close to certain elements'
rare earths are usually found mixed in with stuff like uranium
which makes separating and refining them difficult
Normally yeah, but apparently this particular batch barely has any radioactive material in it
Even if it goes well
it'll reportedly end up costing 100 times what they were paying China
You won't know if it's profitable or not until you actually try it
This is mainly about investing in the technology, not really meant to replace existing resource supply chains
Given today's heavy rain, it's probably mixed with a ton of sewage runoff too
Breaking free from dependence on China is what actually matters here
If it can't compete on price with China, there's no way to break free from them
How do you keep an unprofitable business running long-term?
You a fan of Japan Display and Cool Japan too? (both government-backed initiatives that lost huge sums of money)
Yeah but that ignores the cost-effectiveness
That 50 tons is just the raw mud
The real question is how much usable rare earth you actually get once you extract it from that
wait, hold on lol
That's way too short-sighted, lol
And where are they even going to refine/smelt it in a Japan that's allergic to anything nuclear-related?
Apparently stuff pulled from the seabed has very little radioactive material in it
Is the concentration really that high?
I figured it'd be like a few grams per ton
It's not 54% of the full 50 tons
Out of however many grams of rare earth they actually extracted from the 50 tons of mud, 54% of that is medium-to-heavy rare earths
China's winning big because they just don't care about that
Japan's rare-earth process already solved that problem a while back
Ocean-mined rare earths have way less radioactive material than land-mined ones, so that issue's basically a non-issue… probably
Plenty of things get done because they're necessary, profit or no profit
If they can use crazy-expensive rare earths to make industrial products and still win on price, sure, why not
This is exactly the kind of field where profitability isn't optional
Background and Key Points
Minamitorishima (also called Marcus Island) is Japan’s easternmost territory, an isolated atoll roughly 1,900 km southeast of Tokyo with no civilian population beyond a small Self-Defense Force post. Rare-earth-rich mud in the seabed nearby was first identified around 2013 by a Waseda University team working with JAMSTEC, and the area has since become the focus of Japan’s most serious attempt to build a domestic rare-earth supply chain independent of China, which has supplied the overwhelming majority of Japan’s imports and briefly cut off shipments during a 2010 diplomatic dispute over the Senkaku Islands. This 50-ton haul, pulled from roughly 6,000 meters down, is a test-mining milestone meant to prove the extraction technology works, not a commercial shipment.
The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t over whether the mud is real or valuable, but over what kind of project this is: some posters judged it purely as a business case and concluded it fails on unit economics (100x the cost of Chinese supply), while others argued it should be judged as strategic infrastructure — like national defense or welfare spending — where “does it turn a profit” is the wrong question.
What the thread likely obscures for outside readers is the difference between the 50 tons of raw mud and the actual rare-earth content extracted from it, which is a much smaller quantity measured in grams-per-ton concentrations. Posters also raised, without fully resolving, that land-based rare-earth deposits typically carry more radioactive thorium and uranium, which is part of why Chinese refining is cheap but environmentally costly — a tradeoff this deep-sea source may partly sidestep, though no refining facility for it yet exists in Japan.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Good News] 50 Tons of Rare-Earth Mud Successfully Recovered Off Minamitorishima.”
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