"rare earth minerals are not necessarily rare, some are more abundant than copper, they are just often hard to find in large deposits like other minerals."
Not even that - they tend to be bound up with an element called Thorium - mildly radioactive (15 billion year half life) and as such expensive to get rid of.
Unless you decide to restart Alvin Weinberg's Molten Salt Nuclear reactor projects (which eliminate the single most problematic item from nuclear power - water) - and the it becomes a valuable nuclear fuel at less that 0.01% of the price of reactor-grade uranium (those reactors were ALSO invented by Alvin Weinberg - he made a better mousetrap in the 1960s because he didn't like the costs or weaponisabilty of uranium, or the danger of radioactive steam boilers/bombs and was promptly drummed out of the nuclear industry). Lookup LFTRs and the Oak Ridge Project
Biting the hand that feeds IT
