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America has a tungsten problem

noleary.com

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#51

Post by estearum »

orochimaaru wrote: post #44
wolvoleo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Pretty sure consumers would still buy all the nice downstream products even if they damaged their own backyards.

Evidence: Long history of us doing exactly that.

Valuing convenience, modern products etc does not mean one "doesn't care" about the negative externalities, just like going out to eat at a nice restaurant doesn't mean someone "doesn't care" about saving money.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#52

Post by tbossanova »

orochimaaru wrote: post #44
wolvoleo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

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

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#53

Post by hunterpayne »

a2tech wrote: post #23
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The US has lots of tungsten and other minerals. The problem is mining them here--people really don't want to see huge holes in the ground, industrial run off, and ecological collapse. If the fundamentals of international resource extraction changes (which because of the increase in wages and living standards and expectations in China is happening) then we might see wide spread and rapid mining happening in the US. My…

This isn't a pretty unhinged take.

> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.

No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).

> and ecological collapse

You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.

Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#54

Post by IhateAI_3 »

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!

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#55

Post by irishcoffee »

Hikikomori wrote: post #17
irishcoffee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the US let China do the dirty work because it was cheaper. And it was cheaper because China doesn’t care about dumping waste wherever they’d like and building suicide nets for their employees because of how they’re treated. America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.

China sounds a lot like a conservative wet dream. Are they just jealous?

If you think there are actually conservatives and liberals at the billionaire level I have a bridge to sell you. The joke is on you, boss.

Ignoring your ignorance for a moment, the logic you could have realized is, the US did it to save money and line their pockets. Political affiliations have nothing to do with it.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#56

Post by maxglute »

PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.

Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#57

Post by tehjoker »

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

Just a nitpick, but it is the reverse, the United States has become more adversarial. China isn't kidnapping heads of state.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#58

Post by terminalshort »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #34
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.

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.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#59

Post by hunterpayne »

dotancohen wrote: post #38
hunterpayne wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#60

Post by NedF »

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.

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