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America has a tungsten problem
- tomondev 8mo agoNot surprising. In addition to Tungsten or rare earth materials, I am sure there are many more "problems" that America is dependent on China.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoYeah, 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.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoFear not, we will Make America Great Again. Back to the "gilded age".
- Hikikomori 8mo agoChina sounds a lot like a conservative wet dream. Are they just jealous?
- irishcoffee 8mo agoIf 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.
- MisterTea 8mo agoI 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 pretty much all over the world. The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine. Some clarification is needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten#Production
- noleary 8mo agoReserves means something specific in the context of minerals! Reserves measure 'economically viable' deposits. [1] There used to be tons of tungsten mines in the USA, e.g. in Colorado linked below. [1] https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/insights/rcf-partners-blog/mineral-resources-reserves/ https://resourcecapitalfunds.com/insights/rcf-partners-blog/... [2] https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-mines-colorado/ https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-m...
- bell-cot 8mo agoYes, but it should be emphasized how dependent "Reserves" are on both exploration work, and current assumptions about future mining/refining/market conditions. China's secret to having most of the world's Reserves may be that they bored a lot more test holes (to actually know "the rock in >THIS< spot is X% tungsten") than anyone else, then made some more-optimistic assumptions.
- to11mtm 8mo agoEhhh, it could go both ways (as far as over-optimism) On one hand, historically there's a lot of sparsely populated land; that makes it easier to both do exploration and partition off the land. Also there is China's more central economy planning; i.e. if it's truly worth it they are more willing to do something about relocating people while 'selling it better' (which is again helped by the sparse populations where they are looking.) That is, unless you are saying they fudged the sampling.... However, that's still other a weird reversal of the geopolitical playbook; that is, one could argue that the -smartest- thing the US/EU can do, is to import whatever natural materials they can, until the 'clock' runs out, then the native materials can be extracted (even at the 'ecologically correct' cost.)
- lkbm 8mo ago> The Wikipedia Tungsten article states the largest reserves are in China followed by Canada, Russia, Vietnam and Bolivia. This contradicts the articles claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine. It doesn't contradict the claim. Just because it's all over does not mean it is easy to dig up and refine, but just because it's not the largest reserve doesn't mean it's not easy to dig up and refine.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoIt's worth mentioning that the US has tungsten mines, but they are not operating currently. https://www.usgs.gov/data/tungsten-deposits-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/data/tungsten-deposits-united-states
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoThe raw GIS data of US tungsten deposits is linked to here: https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5ae385eae4b0e2c2dd320826 https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5ae385eae4b0e2c2dd3... The site loads very, very slowly.
- Gravityloss 8mo agoBetween stable and contract honoring entities it's also possible to trade for things that not everyone produces, or do large long term investments in things like mines or refineries outside your own territory.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 01100011 8mo agoThere 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.
- Gigachad 8mo agoWith 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.
- dmurray 8mo agoThe 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 https://www.metal.com/tungsten [1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_oil_consumption [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
- bell-cot 8mo agoBetween the critical strategic/military need, the by-far largest producer being an unfriendly rival power, and commercial production looking like a very poor fit for the use case - the Old School solution would be for the gov't to own & probably operate the needed mines, refining facilities, and stockpiles. But between our low-functioning gov't and our lower-functioning Capitalist-Ideological Complex, I'd be surprised if such a solution was even mentioned.
- queenkjuul 8mo agoDon't worry, it wasn't
- HelloUsername 8mo agoAre they secretly building the "Rods from God"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
- a2tech 8mo agoThis 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 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. We need many of these materials, and we have them, but we haven't had the will to mine them. Lots of people want to open US government lands to these resource extraction outfits, but there's right worry about the potential for ecological destruction.
- noleary 8mo agoHey, 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.
- stevenwoo 8mo agoThe 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.
- cumquat 8mo agoLandscape mode helps.
- red369 8mo agoI 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).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 8mo ago1. Fusion is not going to be a reality any time in the next 50 years. 2. Why does the US import tungsten? Is it that we don't have any, or it's cheaper to just buy it from China?
- AceJohnny2 8mo agoThe US govt already tracks the geopolitical status of "Critical Minerals" at the USGS: https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas
- sholladay 8mo agoSo we are finally building the Rods from God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
- chwtutha 8mo agoJust want to say respect for making the blog and leading with a self-taught post about tungsten. Very cool dude stuff. Add an RSS feed.
- goopypoop 8mo agoobligatory simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTLYris4kJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTLYris4kJU
- h4kunamata 8mo agoTungsten 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.
- PKop 8mo ago> walk with their passport so they are not sent to jail No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. Checking that people here actually belong here else they're deported is part of the "cost of living" solution, in addition to crime.
- skulk 8mo ago> No, it's broken because we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs. The idea that deporting every undocumented person will reduce the bloat and profit extraction in our health care system is making me giggle. And do you really think checking every person is a strategy that scales? Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come? Maybe those workers actually belong here more than you'd like to admit, but the powers that be enjoy keeping their status uncertain to use as a piñata they can beat whenever they need political candy.
- PKop 8mo ago>Why not just indiscriminately jail the people who hire them and thereby create a strong incentive to come? We definitely should do this, yes.
- dtauzell 8mo agoI think overall immigration is a net benefit: https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023 https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-g...
- phendrenad2 8mo ago> 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- maxglute 8mo agoPRC 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.
- lovich 8mo agoLooking 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.
- dexwiz 8mo agoVery 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.
- kbelder 8mo ago>Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make 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.
- throwup238 8mo agoThe balls aren’t that hard to make [1], but doing so at scale economically isn’t something you can build with some plug and play off the shelf machinery. It takes years to assemble a functioning factory like that and tune the process before it’s profitable. All the Western companies that make them are decades old with established and largely paid off manufacturing lines but once the Chinese government decided it was a critical industrial product downstream from their five year plans, it was just a matter of time and capital. Few other governments are willing to subsidized specialized manufacturing like that so investors don’t want to risk entering an established market. 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 https://youtu.be/41Z5v4NybWA?si=xzFw2xD93D9TfW6F (process for the balls starts around 1:50)
- fnord77 8mo agoFort Knox is full of tungsten
- icegreentea2 8mo agoBtw, the paper referenced for tungsten production is co-funded by a US tungsten exploration/mining company: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/harnessing-tungsten-for-next-generation-fusion-reactors/60314/ 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/S0920379625000833 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...). I wish it would elaborate more on the challenges with recycling.
- trebligdivad 8mo agoThe UK has a big tungsten deposit; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerdon_Mine Come buy our tungsten! (We'll throw in a choice of Eccles cake or Tunnocks tea cakes as a special offer)
- stefantalpalaru 8mo ago[dead]
- riwsky 8mo agoAm I the only one who finds this material rather dense?
- david927 8mo agoNow try copper, aluminum and more. I saw a clip from a conference that said for copper, at 3% GDP growth, the global demand in the next 18 years will exceed the last 10,000 years, but 80% of known reserves have already been mined. It seems to me that development in the future is going to be constrained. Not to be dramatic but are we in the sort of happy pre-pandemic days not knowing the changes heading our way? Or am I being too dramatic?
- russdill 8mo agoGood news, we have big plans to send significant quantities of copper and aluminum into orbit with zero possibility of recovery.
- throwup238 8mo agoGood news, that’s a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mining operations. Rocket payloads are measured in the metric tons; copper mining is measured in tens of millions of metric tons per year. It’s not even a rounding error, you’d have to launch hundreds of solid copper rockets a day to even make a dent.
- russdill 8mo agoElon is talking about a million satellite constellation and launching a rocket capable of putting 100 tons into orbit every hour.
- throwup238 8mo agoAnd here I thought we’d moved past taking his nonsense at face value.
- kasperset 8mo agoThis reminds me of another article I read today about Gallium. https://archive.ph/YgRUv https://archive.ph/YgRUv Original Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/the-defense-department-is-infatuated-with-this-drippy-silver-metal-199cd3d0 https://www.wsj.com/business/the-defense-department-is-infat...
- Animats 8mo agoThere are at least three US tungsten mining startups.[1][2][3] It looks like the product is the stock, not the mineral. They're all in the money-acquisition stage. Two have animated American flags on their sites. The third is Canadian-owned. It's worse than the wannabe rare earth mining companies. [1] https://www.unitedstatestungsten.com/ https://www.unitedstatestungsten.com/ [2] https://investornews.com/critical-minerals-rare-earths/american-tungstens-idaho-revival-powers-the-u-s-critical-minerals-offensive/ https://investornews.com/critical-minerals-rare-earths/ameri... [3] https://www.patriotcritical.com/ https://www.patriotcritical.com/
- dwd 8mo agoThere are some Australia startups with the American flags everywhere. Resolution Minerals (which has some dodgy connection to the Trump boys) might have been the first to go with the heavy US patriotic tilt. Trigg Minerals was more normal, but have recently rebranded as American Tungsten and Antimony and has gone full patriot as well to attract US buy-in.
- sgnelson 8mo agoWhat about cobalt? For the largest part of the market, tungsten carbide cutting tools, it's usually a composite of tungsten carbide and cobalt. Thankfully, in most industries that use tungsten carbide, there is a lot of recycling of the material (though probably not enough.) Like anything, it's a complex problem, with no easy answers.
- pstuart 8mo agoFYI: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-important-for-green-energy-so-why-has-americas-only-coablt-mine-closed https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219246964/cobalt-is-importan... tl;dr there's currently no overarching plan to help the US catch up to China, and we're going to let "the market" fix that problem. Being that "the market" in the US is about quarterly earnings reports and strategic bonuses for the C-suite, I'm keeping my expectations in check.
- dwd 8mo agoThey're working on it. 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.
- ricksunny 8mo agoThat's cool - I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes. May I ask how did you come to be confident enough to risk capital on something that's not typically within the average tech person's familiarity space? Asking b/c I would like to be able to develop such confidence if I could credibly (even just to myself) do so.
- lightedman 8mo ago"I'd imagine 'invested in a mining concern' is rare on the spectrum of HNers' resumes." You'd be surprised how many of us actually have a mining claim or two ;)
- 55555 8mo agoActually, if you follow stock tip accounts on X, investing in Australian commodity miners is like the current hot trend, for a few weeks already. This is not to assume that the parent commenter invested for this reason.
- dwd 8mo agoProblem is, once it's a trend you may be too late. In saying that, a lot of the stocks I purchased over a year ago peaked about 3/4 months ago but have had massive sell-offs since. Still trading above what I paid so I'm considering doubling down on some as the timeframes to production are still years out.
- dwd 8mo agoMy foray into rare earths, critical minerals and some defense stocks was initially as a hedge against Trump starting a trade war with China, the increasing risk of military confrontation and the rearming of Europe. All three concerns have occurred to some degree, but it's a long game and actually took a lot longer to play out than I had expected in some cases. And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time. The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc. Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach. If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.
- ridgeguy 8mo agoCaught my eye due to family events. One of my uncles was killed in the Pine Creek mine in California. He was repairing an ore crusher when somebody switched it on. Pre-OSHA and tagout days. I doubt we'll be pinched by tungsten shortages. The fusion application isn't going to come on for at least two decades. Smaller apps will be met by known reserves. That said, it is a cool material. Looking for aluminum bars at Alan Steel (CA) years back, I was stunned when I tried (and failed) to pick up a 12" long by 6"diameter piece of what turned out to be tungsten misfiled in the aluminum section. Density, thy name is tungsten.
- Quarrel 8mo agoThis is not the first time that this has been a problem. In WW2 all sides needed more tungsten, hence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Crisis As a side note, Tungsten is a Swedish word ("heavy stone"). It was first "discovered" by a Swede, and they called it Tungsten. Its atomic symbol is W, for wolfram, the German word for it, which even the Swede's use. I find it mildly amusing. (it is to do with tungsten rich ores and the name of the ores that had been known about for a while)
- danielodievich 8mo agoMy fireplace has 1" cubes of tungsten, aluminum, and magnesium, plus a cube of selenite and quartzy-style synthetic prism, all arranged on little stands really close to the floor, so reachable by children. Neighbor 2.5 year old last year was very put out when he couldn't lift the W cube. It is really a lot of fun to hold. Dropping it on one's foot is ill-advised, particularly if you are 2.5 years old.
- anigbrowl 8mo agoCounterpoint: Tungsten is about $1100/ton, so if demand averages 10k tons/year the annual US spend is about $10-12 million. That's peanuts in economic terms. If relations with China deteriorate the US could just set up a front company in some third country, buy tungsten, and re-export it.
- noleary 8mo agoFYI, Tungsten prices are quoted in metric ton units (MTUs) [1], which surprisingly aren't metric tons. They're actually 1% of a metric ton -- or 10kg. [2] So the price of Tungsten is actually 100x that. [1] https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/tungsten-prices/ https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/t... [2] https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/ https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/
- anigbrowl 8mo agoMy bad! Although I think at even $1 billion/year the US is probably not too worried about it for the time being. Thanks for schooling me on this!
- mullingitover 8mo agoChina learned from watching the US use export controls against them, and they've adapted them to their rare earths exports[1]. They're not going to be as easily bamboozled as the US has been with nVidia cards. [1] https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/charting-china/2025/02/chinas-use-of-export-controls/ https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/charting-china/2025/02/...
- yanhangyhy 8mo agoits a system failure, you can write 100000 articles on ‘America has a xxx problem` from now on. find the root cause, solve it.eg: copy,war...anything that works.
- Animats 8mo agoHigh value metal price volatility is huge. Here's copper.[1] Demand is relatively inelastic because, while substitution is possible, it takes years to switch. Supply is relatively inelastic because mines are big, capital-intensive operations. So small supply-demand imbalances produce large price swings. We keep hearing about rare earth shortages, but the mining industry is now worried about a coming rare earth glut.[2] Everybody who can is adding rare earth capacity. Last glut was in 2015. A side effect of Trump's tariffs is a copper glut.[3] Tungsten is in a shortage mode but production is increasing.[4] Tungsten demand for incandescent lamps is down, but other uses are up. This oscillation has real effects. Mines shut down and companies go bankrupt. China operates on a five year plan and can, to some extent, force price stability by having the government control production. This has political risk; it can lead to huge stockpiles of useless material to maintain employment. The US has a National Cheese Reserve due to badly designed milk price supports. Canada has a potato glut. It's worse for food products. Metals don't spoil. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-chart-data https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-ch... [2] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/beyond-beijing-the-uneasy-rise-of-ex-china-rare-earth-supply-chains/ https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/beyond-beijing-the-uneas... [3] https://logistics.maritimeprofessional.com/transport-infrastructure/2025/07/09/the-us-price-bubble-is-deflated-by-the-copper-glut-caused-by-the-tariff-threat https://logistics.maritimeprofessional.com/transport-infrast... [4] https://www.coreconsultantsgroup.com/tungsten-market-outlook-2025-2030-navigating-a-shifting-global-landscape/ https://www.coreconsultantsgroup.com/tungsten-market-outlook...
- kopirgan 8mo agoStrange...was just watching the old Glenn Ford / Rita Hayworth classic Gilda on YT. Also featured a Tungsten cartel. Was wondering why they picked Tungsten of all things. Now I know!
- nephihaha 8mo ago"Why has there been zero domestic tungsten mining in the United States?" Maybe part of their plan is to have tungsten while exhausting everyone else's‽
- HungrMn 8mo ago[dead]
- samspot 8mo agoIf we use our tungsten to make quality Big Mining Drills (https://wiki.factorio.com/Big_mining_drill https://wiki.factorio.com/Big_mining_drill), we can improve the efficiency of known resource patches.