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America has a tungsten problem

noleary.com

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#31

Post by hunterpayne »

noleary wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#33

Post by dfee »

themanmaran wrote: post #30
noleary wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not an expert or a nefarious actor If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!

isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#34

Post by Night_Thastus »

a2tech wrote: post #15

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…

It's a frequent pattern of:

1: "We need to be more self-sufficient with minerals!"

2: "Let's try to kick-start more of our own industry digging it up!"

3: "Wow, that's expensive and can't compete with international prices."

4: "Better shut it down!"

5: Goto 1

Without ever getting that the point was never to be as profitable as overseas sources. Or getting the point and ignoring it.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#35

Post by ericmay »

a2tech wrote: post #26
ericmay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China. This doesn’t see…

People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not. We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else. China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing r…

But let's be very clear here. the US might have outsourced those jobs, which I think is an oversimplification, but the EU also outsourced those jobs and the Chinese welcomed and encouraged that outsourcing. Americans, Europeans, and Chinese workers were all onboard at a national level for this arrangement.

I want to be very clear here to avoid any misunderstanding of an application of moral judgement against the United States for "outsourcing dirty jobs".

> China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.

This could be true. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, in that China never intended to join a US and European led world order because doing so would compromise the power of the authoritarian CCP (free speech, free markets are incompatible with communism) and this became the eventual strategy to work toward energy independence. Of course "independence" isn't a real thing here, just less reliance. You can't run fighter jets or tanks on batteries or solar panels.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#36

Post by wolvoleo »

ericmay wrote: post #21
a2tech wrote: post #15

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…

> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions. There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China. This doesn’t see…

> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.

Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.

China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#37

Post by cumquat »

stevenwoo wrote: post #28
noleary wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.

Landscape mode helps.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#38

Post by dotancohen »

hunterpayne wrote: post #31
noleary wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which…

  > how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat?
The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#39

Post by noleary »

hunterpayne wrote: post #31
noleary wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which…

I'm not smart enough to stake an opinion on the viability of fusion. I pretty much only have high school mechanics and Wikipedia in my toolkit.

I can only ever make material conditional claims about things like this :)

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