The United States hasn’t mined tungsten domestically for more than a decade. China controls roughly 80% of global production. Beijing has tightened export controls. Defense demand is rising. Prices have surged.
And suddenly, sitting beneath Nevada, there may be 1.78 million metric tons of the stuff.
You’d think everybody would be grabbing shovels.
Not so fast.
Developer 3 Proton Lithium estimates its Railroad Valley Minerals project contains what could be the largest known tungsten deposit in the United States — more than five times the size of the country’s next-largest resource, according to MINING.com.
Tungsten isn’t some obscure metal whose biggest contribution to civilization is making a slightly nicer kitchen appliance. This stuff matters.
It’s extraordinarily dense, hard and resistant to heat. That makes it useful in semiconductors and industrial cutting equipment, but also in jet engines, aerospace hardware and armor-piercing ammunition. The military uses tungsten-carbide penetrators precisely because they’re designed to hit hard targets very hard.
So here we have a potentially enormous American deposit of a strategically important metal overwhelmingly produced overseas.
There’s just one wonderfully bureaucratic complication.
NASA got there first.
Part of the deposit lies beneath land the federal government withdrew from mineral development at NASA’s request. In April 2023, the Interior Department removed roughly 23,000 acres of Railroad Valley from mineral leasing for 20 years.
Why?
Satellites.
NASA has used Railroad Valley since 1993 to calibrate instruments aboard Earth-observing satellites. The dry lakebed has a collection of characteristics that make it unusually useful for the job: it’s flat, largely vegetation-free, consistent in color, relatively undisturbed and easy to see from space.
So this isn’t a case where one agency randomly slapped a restriction on some empty acreage and forgot about it. NASA has a legitimate scientific use for the place.
And now another legitimate national interest has arrived underneath it.
“This is a major resource play even with the NASA roadblock to a portion of it,” energy policy analyst David Blackmon told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
He called the conflict an example of the competing interests that can make American energy and mineral permitting so complicated.
Now, stay with me, because the international backdrop makes this considerably more urgent.
China controls approximately 80% of global tungsten production, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Then Beijing started tightening the valve.
China imposed export controls on tungsten and four other critical minerals in February 2025. It later reduced tungsten mining quotas and announced that only 15 companies would be allowed to export the metal during 2026 and 2027.
Meanwhile, prices went flying.
By April 2026, the price of ammonium paratungstate, an intermediate product used to make tungsten metal, had increased more than 200% since the beginning of the year, according to Reuters.
So America finds itself staring at a familiar strategic problem: an important mineral, substantial defense applications and enormous foreign supply concentration.
The Trump administration has already placed the Nevada project under FAST-41, a federal program intended to coordinate agencies and establish permitting timelines for major projects. President Donald Trump expanded the program’s use for critical minerals in 2025 as part of his push for increased domestic production.
Blackmon said tungsten’s military applications made Railroad Valley an obvious candidate.
But here’s the catch: FAST-41 speeds up the process. It doesn’t make the process disappear.
It doesn’t automatically override NASA’s land withdrawal. It doesn’t eliminate environmental review. And it certainly doesn’t prevent somebody from walking into federal court.
We’ve already seen that movie in Idaho.
Environmental organizations sought to halt construction of the Stibnite Gold Project, arguing that mining threatened waterways, wildlife and other environmental resources. A judge denied the request, allowing construction to continue while the underlying litigation proceeds.
Stibnite matters because it could provide another strategically important mineral: antimony, used in munitions, batteries and military materials.
The Defense Department previously awarded $24.8 million to advance that project. The Justice Department has called it critical to national defense.
Different metal. Same basic headache.
America wants domestic mineral supplies, particularly for defense. Then somebody actually proposes digging up those minerals and discovers that getting from “we found it” to “we’re producing it” can become a marathon.
Ashley Burke of the National Mining Association put a rather startling number on that problem.
“It takes 29 years to bring a mine online in the U.S. from discovery to production, including extensive permitting, the second longest timeline in the world; that’s not sustainable,” Burke told the DCNF.
Twenty-nine years.
At that pace, somebody can discover a mineral deposit, start the permitting process, raise children, send them through college and potentially attend their weddings before the mine reaches production.
Burke argues the answer isn’t eliminating environmental review but removing duplicated processes and creating a predictable timetable.
Blackmon said President Trump could potentially force a resolution of the NASA issue if he determined that tungsten production was necessary for national security. Whether that happens remains another question.
And that’s what makes Railroad Valley such an unusual test case.
On one side, NASA has been using the location for legitimate satellite work for more than three decades.
On the other, you’ve potentially got the largest known tungsten deposit in America at a moment when China dominates global production, has tightened exports and the metal’s price has exploded.
Nobody has produced 1.78 million tons of Nevada tungsten yet. The developer’s resource estimate still has to translate into a viable mining operation, and the permitting and land-access questions remain very real.
But America appears to have found an enormous amount of a metal it says it badly needs.
The tungsten is sitting there.
Now Washington has to figure out whether America can actually get to it.
