On April 13, 2026, Flibe Energy’s Kirk Sorensen took part in a two-day workshop in Reno, Nevada, convened by the Army Research Office’s DEVCOM ARO at the University of Nevada and titled “Closing the Gap: Research Priorities for U.S. REE Supply Chain Resilience.” Researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Minnesota, and the National Academies gathered alongside industry representatives and DoD program managers to map the rare earth supply chain problem and identify where targeted investment could make a difference.

Sorensen served as a panelist on the Industry and DoD Perspectives session, alongside James Kennedy of CalderaUSA and Rick Harrison of Applied Research Associates. His central message was that the rare earth challenge and the thorium challenge are two faces of the same problem: rare earth elements occur geologically alongside thorium, and because thorium-bearing process streams fall under Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing, that regulatory burden has been a genuine deterrent to domestic rare earth processing.

Sorensen argued that the thorium produced as a byproduct of rare earth mining is not a liability to be disposed of but an energy resource of extraordinary value. If liquid-fluoride thorium reactors were moving through the regulatory pipeline toward deployment, the economics of domestic rare earth development would look very different — turning one supply chain problem into part of the solution for another.

Flibe Energy commends the Army Research Office for taking supply chain resilience seriously at the research level, and continues to advocate for treating thorium as the strategic asset it is.