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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 un
by a2tech 8mo ago
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 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).
- carshodev 8mo agoI also can recommend material world. Its a great look at how mining and material production works worldwide, I also do not think it covers Tungsten.
- themanmaran 8mo ago> Not an expert or a nefarious actor If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!
- dfee 8mo agoisn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo agoI mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.
- pelagicAustral 8mo agoAs an non-expert myself, that's exactly what I would do.
- emmelaich 8mo agoI for one am not leery of noleary.
- qwertox 8mo agowe'll let it slip, this one time.
- IhateAI_3 8mo ago[dead]
- hunterpayne 8mo agoNice 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.
- dotancohen 8mo ago> 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.
- hunterpayne 8mo agoI said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.
- ben_w 8mo agoWhile 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.
- bmacho 8mo agoLiterally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy. If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
- NedF 8mo ago[dead]
- emmelaich 8mo agoTo what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
- BizarroLand 8mo agoMy guess is that while it is running it will dump spare neutrons into the tungsten, converting the tungsten into exotic materials that are not fit for task for various reasons.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo agoIf you whack enough neutrons into it, you'll eventually get Rhenium and Osmium. Both are actually pretty useful and while not actually dangerous you might not want to get any on you, especially if it's still hot from the reactor. Osmium in powder form will oxidise to osmium tetroxide, and you want to avoid that because it stains just about any kind of plant or animal tissue including the surface of your eyes, and is spectacularly poisonous.
- gkanai 8mo agoYou may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.
- djoldman 8mo agoI'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.
- rsync 8mo agoIt's a website about metals. Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?
- ericmay 8mo ago> 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 seem to be correct. China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it. Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part. With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
- pixl97 8mo agoA good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".
- a2tech 8mo agoPeople 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 reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
- ericmay 8mo agoBut 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.
- Night_Thastus 8mo agoIt'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.
- terminalshort 8mo agoThe 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.
- throwway120385 8mo agoHaving seen some former open pit mines I'm not entirely sure the environmental review is "ridiculous." One of them was basically a huge open pit full of acid.
- buckle8017 8mo agoThat pit also happens to be a great place to do rare earths extraction since there is zero chance of it ever being cleaned up. The acid is natural btw just from things leeching out of the rock walls.
- terminalshort 8mo agoMine the metal or do without the tech that uses it. You have to choose. Years of environmental review do not help.
- toss1 8mo agoThe environmental review WILL help if it is used to adjust the mining techniques so they don't destroy everything nearby to do the work, or even if it jist creates a reclamation / restoration plan (and yes, factor that into the price, it's trivial). Taking too long is a problem.
- incahoots 8mo ago>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...
- hunterpayne 8mo agocough Wolf warrior diplomacy cough
- tehjoker 8mo ago> 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.
- strangegecko 8mo agoThey've both become more adversarial. China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals for a long time (e.g. wrt Japan and Taiwan and SEA). They also continue to expand military based in the SCS that don't belong there, hold exercises to simulate blockades outside of China. Etc.
- FpUser 8mo ago>"China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals" Well, they have wonderful mentor
- Saline9515 8mo agoThis is plainly false. China bought the refining companies doing the extraction for rare earth in the US, extracted knowledge, then shipped the tooling to China and closed the US factories. Having no environmental regulation probably helped as well cost-wise, but that's not the fault of the USA. https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magnequench/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...
- queenkjuul 8mo agoThat article doesn't say anything about selling a mine, it says the only mine was already in China. China bought an American magnet manufacturer which had been using Chinese neodymium to make magnets. It doesn't say anything at all about extraction. Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.
- dwd 8mo agoOriginally there was the Mountain Pass mine, and China setup their own mines while also building out the refining and processing capacity. Until recently MP Materials was shipping all it's output to Chinese refiners. The history and asset ownership is also quite convoluted. Try this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Performance_Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Performance_Materials This article is quite good at explaining how China cornered the market: https://thehustle.co/originals/what-the-hell-are-rare-earth-elements https://thehustle.co/originals/what-the-hell-are-rare-earth-...
- Saline9515 8mo agoThe article explicitly says that the magnet manufacturer was bought by a shell company owned by chinese interests, which lied when they pledged to develop the activity. Not that it's very surprising (US companies routinely do this as well, especially in Europe), but in this case it had clearly an ulterior motive.
- queenkjuul 8mo agoI read the article, i know what it says. OP claimed the Chinese bought a mine, and that the article was about REE extraction. Those weren't accurate statements. (Oh, you're OP. You posted an article that didn't back up your claims, sorry not sorry)
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoProbably just Big W trying to run the markets. Same as it ever was.