April 26, 2026: News Coverage
Magnets can pull rare earth metals from water and turn them into crystals
Common solid magnets made from iron-based alloys can help concentrate rare earth elements in underwater environments, where they may accumulate and form crystals.
April 21, 2026: News Coverage
Researchers Show How Simple Magnets Can Help Solve a Complex Problem
From cell phones to wind turbines and missile defense systems, modern technologies depend on critical minerals like rare earth elements. As demand grows, researchers are exploring more efficient and adaptable methods to recover and reuse these materials.
March 24, 2026: Article
Extracting the Critical Mineral Nickel with Waste Acid
Acidic waste enables enhanced domestic recovery of critical minerals needed for high-performance alloys.
March 10, 2026: News Release
Autonomy Accelerates Science on a National Scale
Autonomous science laboratories are taking shape quickly across the PNNL campus.
January 9, 2026: Research Highlight
Critical Mineral Compounds Respond Differently to Magnets
Studying a series of rare earth element compounds revealed differences in their magnetic behavior that will be leveraged for separations.
January 9, 2026: Research Highlight
Local Magnetic Field Gradients Enable Critical Material Separations
Localized gradients in magnetic fields have long-range effects on the concentration of rare earth ions in solution, facilitating field-driven extraction of critical minerals.
September 12, 2025: Research Highlight
Nanoscale Interactions in Magnetic Fields for Critical Material Separations
Nanoscale domains of magnetically susceptible critical materials encounter enhanced magnetic interactions under external magnetic fields, providing a promising new avenue for separations.
August 21, 2025: News Coverage
Waste from carbon capture helps extract critical minerals
Coupling critical mineral extraction with carbon removal technologies makes both more efficient.
May 20, 2025: Research Highlight
Enabling Urban Mining of Critical Minerals from Domestic Electronic Waste
The NETS team has developed an energy- and chemical-efficient method of separating valuable critical minerals from dissolved solutions of rare earth element magnets.
May 8, 2025: Research Highlight
Selectively Recovering Manganese from Surface Accessible Nodules
Surface manganese mining from nodules in South Dakota is now possible with a new scalable selective precipitation process.
December 5, 2024: Research Highlight
A Streamlined Process to Extract Magnesium from Seawater
Precipitation with sodium hydroxide in a flow-gel device enables the rapid extraction of magnesium from seawater in a new scalable process.
September 26, 2024: News Coverage
Mining the e-scrap stream
PNNL’s process of recovering some critical metals from e-scrap using a mixed-salt water-based solution is noted as a big step in R&D for e-scrap recycling.
April 23, 2024: News Release
Critical Minerals Recovery from Electronic Waste
A nontoxic separation process recovers critical minerals, such as manganese, magnesium, dysprosium, and neodymium, from electronic scrap waste.
January 24, 2024: Article
Separating Critical Materials from Dissolved Batteries
A simple gel-based system separates metals ions from a model solution of dissolved battery electrodes without the need for specialty chemicals, membranes, or toxic solvents.