Rare Earth Metal Refinery Nears Approval in Malaysia KUANTAN, Malaysia - The world's largest refinery for rare earth metals has risen out of the red mud of a coastal swamp here and could soon obtain permission to operate - a step that would help break China's near monopoly on rare earths but also worsen an emerging glut of some of these strategic minerals. China's suspension of much-needed exports of rare earths to Japan during a territorial dispute in 2010 fed a bubble in the market that drove prices up 30-fold by last summer. But prices have slumped by up to three-fifths since then for some of the 17 rare earth elements, which are vital to smartphones, wind turbines and other components of the modern economy. The approaching completion of the Malaysian refinery, with the capacity to meet a fifth of the world's demand, has contributed to the plunge. The progress towards opening the plant has occurred despite street demonstrations here over radiation worries, regulatory challenges and the withdrawal of a major equipment supplier worried about the safety of the refinery, which is being built by Lynas, an Australian company. Raja Dato Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the director general of the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, said by telephone Monday evening that the board had discussed at a closed-door meeting earlier in the day whether to grant an initial operating license of up to two years for the refinery, which is a series of more than a dozen sprawling buildings connected by a labyrinth of pipes. He declined to say what the board had decided, but added that an announcement would be made "sooner rather than later." Raja Adnan had said in a phone interview last week that his personal view was that it would be useful to issue the license and then carefully monitor radiation levels at the refinery and in its waste, because he did not trust pilot-scale models designed to predict how the refinery would operate. "We still have the right to stop them and suspend and terminate" if the refinery is not running safely, he said. The board also has no obligation to notify the public of its decision, and may not even notify Lynas immediately either, he said. A delay before announcing the board's decision gives the country's political leaders time to consider whether to postpone or overrule the issuance of a license. But there has been little sign they will do so, as the project is a cornerstone of Malaysia's economic development plan. Fuziah Salleh, an opposition-party lawmaker from Kuantan who has fought the refinery here, said that opponents of the project planned to file a lawsuit in the coming weeks in a last bid to stop it. Critics filed more than 1,000 objections to the project on Thursday, the last day for public comments, partly in the hope that the board would delay action to read them. Lynas has been trying for several years to find a site for the permanent disposal of the roughly 20,000 tons a year of low-level radioactive waste that will be produced, and is still struggling to do so. The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna recommended last June that a long-term disposal plan be approved by regulators before the refinery starts operations. Lynas now says that it has met this goal with a plan that calls for storing up to 20 years of the refinery's production waste in pits lined with plastic and clay at the refinery, plus a commitment to find a site for a permanent repository and build it. Raja Adnan said that the Malaysian board would require that Lynas meet all of the energy agency's recommendations, but he declined to say whether the company's waste disposal plan complied. After sending a team here last spring at the request of the Malaysian government, the agency also recommended that the project include greater public disclosure and communication. Malaysian regulators and Lynas put three printed copies of the revised project plan on public view for two weeks this month at four locations in Malaysia, where they could be viewed on request for only one hour at a time. Volunteers ended up taking turns over 56 hours to copy the entire document by hand, then retyped the information at home to recreate the full document, Mrs. Salleh said. Nicholas Curtis, the chairman of Lynas, said that the company was using proved Chinese technology, but had paid special attention to improving its safety and environmental performance. "We simply took Chinese processes, scaled them up and cleaned them up," Mr. Curtis said in a speech in Hong Kong in November.