101–110 of 211 posts
Invested in an Australian tungsten miner late last year. Has an operating profitable mine in Spain and active Government support to restart the large Mt Carbine mine in Queensland.
Antimony is another critical mineral. A number of smallcap Antimony/Tungsten miners are exploring potential deposits in Idaho and Tennessee and Australia, but timelines are long.
I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end. Though I would hazard a guess that the answers to the first three can be summed up as "it's easier and cheaper to let China do the dirty work." The last question I cant answer as I don't understand boom-bust mining cycles. Edit to add: > After all, it turns out tungsten actually isn't hard to find! It's all over the United States. In fact, it's pret…
It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream. It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.
This website has no author attribution and this is the only article on it. I would be very suspicious of its claims (not that I disagree with them, just that unattributed works on brand new websites are not ALWAYS the most trustworthy). The United States has exported the dirtiest businesses internationally for quite a few years (raw mineral extraction is a dirty, nasty business, with slim margins). Now that China has…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...
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Looking up details on this because I had never heard of the situation, and I was unaware that the ballpoint pen was only produced by so few countries. I didn’t realize the tips were tungsten carbide either.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
I remember this was on a list of zero-g manufacturing techniques that NASA was investigating at one point. I wonder what became of that? Normally, I'd think the cost would be prohibitive, but you can probably fit a lot of 0.1mm ball bearings in a ton of cargo.
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Individual EUers might care about the environment. It’s pretty hard to personally avoid any dirty imported stuff as you just don’t know where it all ends up. Though I guess overall voting patterns might back up your argument
What are you talking about its trivial to avoid purchasing product's produced in environmentally unfriendly ways. All products from China are manufactured with electricity that is largely coal. You just mean it's not economical.
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> > China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. It's amazing how many people think China bootstrapped its industry from first principals when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying.
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now wes…
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Looking up details on this because I had never heard of the situation, and I was unaware that the ballpoint pen was only produced by so few countries. I didn’t realize the tips were tungsten carbide either.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
The hard part is really quality control when making hundreds of thousand or millions of balls a day, at which point all metrology equipment is basically useless except for random sampling, which means your process has to be pretty much perfect before anyone will even buy from you, but you cant slow down the process because then you’re just losing money.
[1] https://youtu.be/41Z5v4NybWA?si=xzFw2xD93D9TfW6F (process for the balls starts around 1:50)
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Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend. I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.
To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
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West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now wes…
No, we don't.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
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The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.
Having seen some former open pit mines I'm not entirely sure the environmental review is "ridiculous." One of them was basically a huge open pit full of acid.