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Is the world really running out of sand?

practical.engineering

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Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#101

Post by outlog »

epistasis wrote: post #83
larsrc wrote: post #81

We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand? Thanks for the puns, too.

It's quite likely that the cost of idle capital is much higher than the cost of paying others to accept electricity. Depending on the price swings, a battery may be a much better investment.

better make it a sand battery: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/10/sand-batteries-cou...

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#102

Post by Someone »

larsrc wrote: post #81

We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand? Thanks for the puns, too.

Free power doesn’t mean free production.

There’s also labor, wear on the machines and the lost opportunity of using your money to do something else. Building such crushing machines and only use them x% of the time (for, for now, fairly small values of x) may not be a good investment.

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#103

Post by lb1lf »

mcculley wrote: post #79

One thing that surprised me when I started running a tugboat business: A country can be both an exporter and importer of sand. Sand of one type goes from the U.S. to The Bahamas to be used in concrete. Sand of another type goes from The Bahamas to the U.S. to be used in aquariums. Specialty sands go to make regulation volleyball courts.

Indeed!

Then there is all kinds of specialty sands - say, when replacing the sand in our local athletics union long jump pits, I learned that one should use sand from river beds (as opposed to sand crushed at a plant) as the river sand is much less likely to cause abrasions, seeing as all the sharp edges have been worn away as the sand has been shifted back and forth by the river current...

Sand is not just sand.

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#104

Post by cdchn »

larsrc wrote: post #81

We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand? Thanks for the puns, too.

I hate to say this, but why aren't the Bitcoin miners jumping all over that?

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#105

Post by phyzome »

neeleshs wrote: post #77

Learned so much about sand in 20 minutes! He mentions nebula.tv at the end. Does anyone have feedback on the content over there?

Yeah, I subscribe to Nebula -- and he's actually the reason I did. They have a decent size catalog although my interests are narrow enough that I only actually follow a couple of channels there. But that's certainly been worth the price.

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#106

Post by mkonecny »

eichin wrote: post #5

Ironically, we just hit an entirely different "sand catastrophe" - https://mastodon.social/@mimsical/113232531800424706 > the crucibles used to create ingots of silicon which become microchips are made from an ultra-pure quartz sand -- and 70% of the world's supply comes from just one place in North Carolina [Spruce Pine]

A coincidence is not ironic

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#108

Post by sundarurfriend »

> I tried to track down the original source of this idea ... Beiser cites an article from the UN, which itself cites a 2006 paper about using two types of desert sand from China in concrete. But that paper doesn’t mention the roundness of the particles at all.

This seems to be a fairly common pattern where a citable source (Beiser's book and the UN article) makes a mistake, that then propagates everywhere as common knowledge even though it's incorrect. There are many well-researched blog articles like this out there, where the author has dug deep, done the hard research, and found mistakes at many levels, but because it's not in what academia or Wikipedia considers a "citable" source, the mistaken assertion continues to be propagated. Until someone manages to present it in an academically acceptable format, if that happens at all.

Solving the "what should be a citable source" problem is complicated, but in the interim, I hope we can at least find a way to transfer these well-researched findings and corrections from non-academic sources to citable forms regularly and easily.

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#109

Post by neeleshs »

phyzome wrote: post #105
neeleshs wrote: post #77

Learned so much about sand in 20 minutes! He mentions nebula.tv at the end. Does anyone have feedback on the content over there?

Yeah, I subscribe to Nebula -- and he's actually the reason I did. They have a decent size catalog although my interests are narrow enough that I only actually follow a couple of channels there. But that's certainly been worth the price.

Thank you.

Re: Is the world really running out of sand?

#110

Post by btown »

samatman wrote: post #95
btown wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, didn't know that! Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led_Zeppelin#Formation:_1966%E... : > One account of how the new band's name was chosen held that Moon and Entwistle had suggested that a supergroup with Page and Beck would go down like a "lead balloon", an idiom for being very unsuccessful or unpopular.[21] The group dropped the 'a' in lead at the suggestion of [manager] Peter Grant, so that those unfamiliar…

> And one could be forgiven for thinking that a formation of flying things would necessarily have one member in the lead position. Indeed. In which case you would have the lead zeppelin, and the led zeppelins.

Now that's what I call burying the lead!
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