Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

It’s A Huge Rare Metal Discovery For America, But Claiming The Prize Isn’t So Easy

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Nevada’s Railroad Valley is home to a tungsten deposit that could be the largest ever found in the United States. Developer 3 Proton Lithium (3PL) reports an inferred resource of 1.78 million tons, making the resource more than five times bigger than the next known domestic deposit, with an in-situ value pegged around $152 billion at current prices.

Tungsten prices have skyrocketed since early 2025 amid surging demand from aerospace, defense and industry. Export controls from China, which controls about 80% of global supply, have accelerated that price rise.

The United States largely walked away from domestic mining 40 years ago and now depends on imports for a metal essential to munitions, armor-piercing rounds, high-temperature alloys, and a range of Pentagon systems. As 3PL’s Kevin Moore put it bluntly to the Financial Times: “This is not a mining story. It is a national security story.”

Yet a big chunk of the prize remains off-limits because NASA objects to mining on about one-third of the company’s claims. The space agency uses the barren desert expanse to calibrate satellite instruments and insists that activity would interfere with a unique site for receiving and verifying satellite signals.

At NASA’s request, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew roughly 17 square miles from mining and exploration in 2023. 3PL is lobbying the Trump administration and Congress to reverse the withdrawal, arguing it was imposed without complete geological information. NASA’s position is unchanged.

This clash between NASA’s calibration needs and the Pentagon’s requirement for secure domestic supplies of a critical munitions metal is classic American permitting theater. The conflict is typical of the kinds of competing stakeholder interests which routinely delay mining projects from discovery to production across the country.

The pattern is familiar: a strategic resource is identified, the national-security case is clear, but the legitimate interests of another stakeholder — in this case, NASA — come into conflict. By the time the dust settles, China has further entrenched its dominance and prices have spiked again.

The Trump administration has taken the positive step of placing the Railroad Valley Minerals project into the FAST-41 federal permitting program. That designation is designed to accelerate coordination among agencies and compress timelines for environmental reviews and other approvals. It is a practical recognition that critical minerals belong on the national-security priority list alongside energy production. FAST-41 can help cut through some of the bureaucratic obstruction that has made U.S. mine development glacial compared with competitors.

What FAST-41 cannot do is shield the project from the litigation that will almost certainly follow. Left-wing anti-development groups have perfected the art of using the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other statutes as weapons of delay.

Lawsuits challenging any eventual permits or any reversal of the NASA withdrawal are inevitable. Courts and this kind of activist lawfare can add years even after an administration has prioritized a project. FAST-41 speeds the front end of permitting; it offers little meaningful protection against the back-end legal assault that has become standard operating procedure for opponents of resource development.

The broader context is the same one that has dogged rare earths, copper, and other critical minerals for years. America talks a strong game about supply-chain security and reducing dependence on adversarial nations, then allows procedural gridlock and inter-agency friction to block the very projects that would deliver results.

Tungsten is not an abstract “green transition” metal; it is an unambiguous national defense requirement. Relying on Chinese supply for materials that go into munitions is a strategic vulnerability no serious national-security apparatus should tolerate.

Railroad Valley brings the overarching national problem into focus:

• A world-class domestic deposit sits under Nevada desert.
• One federal agency needs the surface for satellite work.
• Another set of national interests needs the mineral for weapons and industrial resilience.
• The administration has tried to clear a faster path with FAST-41, yet the land withdrawal remains, the lobbying continues, and the lawsuits will come.

Until the United States develops a culture that treats domestic mining of critical minerals as a national-security imperative rather than just another land-use dispute, these discoveries will keep running into the same roadblocks. China’s communist government does not have this problem. That fact alone should concentrate a few minds in Washington.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.