It means unless Sweden is willing to spend a ton of money to make it less damaging to the environment they will pollute the heck out of their land. If they choose to spend that money they won't be able to produce at anywhere close to competitive prices.

Unless they want to make a strategic decision to subsidize the industry to not be helpless to the whims of China it doesn't make economic sense to develop it. The U.S. is considering just that since our military and high tech industry requires large quantities of rare earths.

What most people don't realize is that rare earth metals aren't rare. The only difficulty and problem with producing them is the incredibly dirty refining process. There are huge deposits all over the world but we've let China take the market lead in production by letting them pollute their land rather than ours.