One flash is all it takes.
That’s how James Tour believes America can tackle China’s rare earth dominance.
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, so you can recycle it, recycle it again,” 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.
Tour says his technology would put the United States on a faster track. “It would give us a map to get independent,” he said.
His invention is modular, 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.”
US Dominance Lost to China
Rare earths, a subgroup of 17 critical minerals, serve as essential components in electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and missiles.
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.
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 rare earth exports the following year.
Fast forward 20 years, the United States is now 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.
Waste to Treasure
As early as 1976, the United States had a law regulating electronic waste disposal.
“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.”
“This is a win-win all around.”
Lucas Eddy, technology development manager for Metallium’s Texas subsidiary Flash Metals USA, 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, said 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.
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.”
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,” said Eddy.
Converting metals to chlorides bypasses that intermediate step.
‘Every Scientist’s Dream’
The technique has wide environmental applications beyond rare earth metals.
The researchers have used it to remove toxic metals from red mud, the byproduct of aluminum production, leaving an aluminum-rich material that can go into ceramic tiles or back into the regular aluminum production cycle.
Jewelry manufacturers have approached them for the gold in the electronics, and others sought the purified glass on cell phones after they extract lithium, Tour said.
Even the plastic parts on the print circuit boards can be useful, he said. Under high heat, he said, plastics break down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, a fuel source and cornerstone in chemical manufacturing.
There’s very little waste in the process, Tour said.
“It’s a big win for our country. It’s a big win for the environment, and hopefully it’s going to be a big win for the investors.”
They are still optimizing the temperature control system to increase metal purity. But for what they have, there’s already a market.
The company’s commercial scale plant outside of Houston is on track to start production in early 2026. Tour said the goal is to process 1 ton per day of print circuit boards by January, and 20 tons by September. Two additional sites in Massachusetts and Virginia are now in the works.
According to Tour, when he pitched the idea to a group of NATO generals, one of them stood up, and said “This is going to prevent wars.”
“Most wars are fought over resources, water, oil, minerals,” Tour said. “People fight over this, and they kill each other over this.”
From Asia to Australia to Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump has been building a coalition around the globe to counter China’s critical minerals chokehold.
Tour said he’s excited to see his innovation developing into potential national security leverage.
“To be able to solve a critical problem for the country—this is like every scientist’s dream.”
