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America has a tungsten problem

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Re: America has a tungsten problem

#61

Post by hunterpayne »

incahoots wrote: post #49
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 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 an…

cough Wolf warrior diplomacy cough

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#62

Post by Supermancho »

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.

Tungsten demand is real and bulk sources are quite scarce, today. It would be helpful if the historical charts went back farther than 2016. Where did the US get Tungsten in the 80s and 90s? South Korea, China, and Russia. The US and Canada had Tungsten mines, but the value wasn't there due to international pricing undercutting the industry. America's dogged federal agenda to break free of all Chinese influence or Capitalism, which will go first? We know the answer.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#63

Post by lovich »

maxglute wrote: post #56

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 advanc…

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.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#65

Post by MisterTea »

hunterpayne wrote: post #53
a2tech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

> > 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.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#66

Post by ben_w »

hunterpayne wrote: post #59
dotancohen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While true in isolation, that is the wrong reason to care.

We get power from the sun very effectively over 150 billion meters of vacuum.

Biggest problem with fusion is doing the fusion for a low enough input power (or for pulsed, energy) cost.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#67

Post by maxglute »

hunterpayne wrote: post #53
a2tech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.

>almost always takes place far from population centers

No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#68

Post by red369 »

cumquat wrote: post #37
stevenwoo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).

Re: America has a tungsten problem

#69

Post by icegreentea2 »

Btw, the paper referenced for tungsten production is co-funded by a US tungsten exploration/mining company: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/harnessing-tungsten-fo...

I can only read the free part of the paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...). I wish it would elaborate more on the challenges with recycling.

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