obligatory simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTLYris4kJU
America has a tungsten problem
41–50 of 211 posts
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#42Tungsten is the least of their problem.
When a population cannot afford health care system, and have to walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail, you have a broken country.
Not to mention the financial problems.
Tungsten won't matter when there is no country.
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#43There is likely a good amount of tungsten, along with other useful elements, sitting buried in US landfills. It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.
With most resources, it’s usually not that they literally can’t be found, but that the cheap sources are gone. If tungsten costs 20x as much to extract, it doesn’t matter that it technically exists, a lot of users are just not going to be able to afford it.
The article says the US currently imports about 10,000 tons of tungsten per year, and has no active production, so that's also its current usage.
Tungsten costs about $200/kg [0]
So the total US tungsten usage is $2 billion/year.
If the price goes up 20x overnight, and nobody changes their purchasing behaviours, that costs US businesses, consumers and government $38 billion.
That's a lot of money for most people, but it's being spread over a wide base.
For a comparison, the US uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day [1] or 7 billion per year. So a 20x shock in tungsten would be roughly equivalent to oil prices going up $5/barrel. In fact oil fluctuates by that much most quarters [2], if not most months. People complain a little when it goes up, but it takes more than that to really have a noticeable effect on the economy.
A 2x or 5x price increase - a huge shock in any context - would be problematic for a few companies, but really business as usual for the US as a whole.
[0] https://www.metal.com/tungsten
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#44Earlier 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…
> 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 bypro…
You don’t care about the environment. You care about the environment in your backyard. Otherwise you would not import rare earths and minerals from China (which Europe does).
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#45I 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…
> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. No, it does not, it's just a confusion of the term reserves. That's not on you, though, because everyone constantly gets it wrong. Reserves are not estimates of the amount of a mineral underground. To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the min…
> To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.
You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.
The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#46Earlier 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…
Commonwealth fusion is theoretically pretty close with their high temp superconductors.
Far from a slam dunk, but I don’t think we’re as far from net gain as we were 10 years ago.
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#47> One wonders: Why does China produce >80% of the world's tungsten? Why has there been zero domestic tungsten mining in the United States?
Mining and refining rare earth is a dirty process. NIMBYs pushed it farther and farther away until it was on the other side of the world.
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#48Earlier 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
Very carefully.
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#49This 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
I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.
One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...
Re: America has a tungsten problem
#50[deleted]