I 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
Yes, 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.
Ehhh, 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.)
> 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.
> 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 mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.
China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.
Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.
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 questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.
> 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.
> > 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.
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
Not even close. EUV lithography is as close to magic as it gets. By any reasonable assessment it shouldn't work but a few wizards somehow manage to pull it off.
Not even close in sense it's likely going to take west longer to build M/HREE at scale than PRC figuring out EUV + entire indigenize semi supply chain at scale.
The execution difference is PRC is generating enough semi talent to replicate EUV and entire semi stack sooner than later. They already have the most complete localized semi supply chain in single nation, i.e. they're doing ASML+5000 niche suppliers at once. Hence consensus estimate is they'll get there somewhere 2030-2035. Reminder EUV is basically a "tiny" ass effort from a handful of countries, for reference airbus/boeing each has 150k employees for commercial aviation, EUV was developed by 3k from Zeiss, 1k from Cymer, 13k from ASML... over 20 years of casual development. It's ultimately a hard but narrow specialization problem, hence PRC EUV prototype beating estimates/expectations. It's not magic, it's just people + cash + industrial vertical integration that PRC is uniquely well equipped to deal with.
VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute. M/HREE is ~20 minerals each has it's own midstream extraction process that require dozens of plants and 100s of stages for 5/6/7+ sigma high end strategic use. It's a different monumental/gargantuan task, on top of the sheer fucking scale of infra involved. I noted Batou has 3 million residents for a reason, that's the scale of M/HREE industry west has to replicate. It takes 8-10 years to get a refinery up in the west, the chance of west getting 100s of highly polluting industrial chains up for M/HREE before PRC sorts out semi is close to zero. It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with. I'd wager M/HREE more bureaucratic magic than even EUV technical magic for west.
Meanwhile, there isn't a single M/HREE plant in western pipeline that will do anything at scale until maybe 2030, only thing in pipeline is validating unproven lab extraction/refining methods by ~2028, if it works, will take years to scale extraction, and even more years to scale refining.
You illustrate a fundamental lack of understanding. 9 women can't produce a single baby in one month. That's just not how it works.
I think you really don't appreciate how utterly ridiculous the implementation details of the smaller lithography processes are. It wasn't merely limited to the west, it was limited to a single company.
> VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute.
Wrong. The west currently lacks investors willing to shift focus to that extent and the state lacks the willingness to divert resources and step in themselves.
> It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with.
It's not that the west is unable. We don't currently have sufficient motivation to overcome the political barriers that prevent speed.
I agree that retooling for that would take many years due to the scale of the physical infrastructure involved, and in practice will likely take multiple decades due to lack of urgency. Where I disagree is the comparison with EUV.
EUV is not a biological process on an immutable. This bad analogy on par with EUV is magic. Second mover advantage = compressing 20 year commercial cycle into 10 year strategic one viable. As it's been consistently done. Litho complexity wank needs to stop. ASML integrator of western expertise, it's not one company. We ended up having 1 integrator due to $$$. Meanwhile PRC generating more expertise with blueprint and poached many of the ASML implementers in the first place, while pursuing any EUV efforts simultaneously, stuff ASML had to ditch due to limitations.
Lack of willingness/urgency is just loser talk for last of system capacity, i.e. overcome political barriers, especially when it's been highlighted how strategic important it is to hammer out separate REE chain. Important to distinguish between unwillingness and simple inability. Easy to strong arm TW to TSMC Arizona for leading edge goals, but can't strong arm PRC to transfer M/HREE tech.
Note I didn't say M/HREE was "easier" than EUV in technical sense. I said in terms of execution, i.e. overcoming barriers, PRC is simply going to have easier working with EUV engineering problem than west with M/HREE engineering, massive infra, domestic politics problem. So it's going to be slow going, in terms of execution time.
Instead of continuing to parade your ignorance go read a whitepaper detailing the EUV process before telling me that it isn't akin to magic. Any other critical industry would have multiple competing techniques and implementors. There's even still more than one company operating cutting edge fabs despite the number dwindling as the processes got smaller.
An economic superpower identified cutting edge lithography in general as a national priority, allocated the resources, and after something like two decades of intensive research is _still_ trailing by many years. I can't immediately think of any other commercialized technology with a similar difficulty level.
As for REE, political willingness is entirely orthogonal from physical capability. A bunch of hot air on the evening news is irrelevant. If the politicians don't allocate the funds then they clearly don't see it as a top priority. If there were a pressing need then it would get done.
Where we really see the political dysfunction is the lack of planning for the future. By the time it's an urgent need there won't be enough time left for the buildout. But that's unrelated to the topic at hand.
I think western companies and governments have ingrained into their own thinking that the optimization strategy of of minimal investments in fundamental sciences and engineering as real constraint. (actually in more that just that, but that goes off topic..) It's a short term focused fictionalization / profit extraction constraint, but because that's so built into the experience and performance companies in the west, many predictions completely misunderstand what is possible with a different focus. We'll see how fast this can be re-calibrated.
The "the Chinese can only copy us" thing is quite common in some circles, just as the "all the Japanese can do is copy us" was 50-odd years ago. China overtook the west in a lot of areas 10-20 years ago, to see an example of this travel to any city in China. It's like travelling into the future, we're a decade or more behind them at this stage.
The scare quotes the earlier comment put around "learned" are unwarranted, but "they copied us instead of bootstrapping" and "they can only copy us" are very different statements.
> all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying
Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.
I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.
What happened one way, can happen the other. Recently, I've watched a documentary about late 19th century steel maker. His approach was very similar to what many seem to consider "uniquely Chinese" for some reason.
He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.
West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.
It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.
The biggest reason as others have already discussed, manufacturing is inherently dirty work so better off shore and be concerned about the environment locally.
>Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the Chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China
"Fell for it" looks a lot like "basically compelled by the economic impacts of public policy and political winds" so far as I can tell.
Some man in a C-suite in 2002 who was wrestling with a decision to refresh domestic factories with capital investments that would pay off over the next 15yr and be competitive for 30 or build new in China could only make that decision one way without being ousted by his own board. Even if the economics barely penciled out positively after compliance costs the political winds made it too risky.
I mean, yeah, someone fell for it. The public, the politicians, etc. etc. But it's not like anyone who didn't have to grapple with the numbers didn't know what they were doing was suspect at best, though many of course deluded themselves into believing in it.
How many decades and dollars did we spend shipping trash plastic overseas because they provided us with receipts saying they were recycling it when they were landfilling, burning or dumping it? Everyone who knew the chemistry and energy prices knew it didn't really work but still, it happened.
>"when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying"
Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow
Every time there is a discussion about how China is wiping the floor with the west, someone wants to chime in that they stole IP. It is an unhealthy fixation and betrays the fact that they are genuinely more efficient in many cases, even when labor costs and subsidies are removed.
Not to mention, complaining about China stealing IP is a pacifier. Even where true, it does not change the competitive dynamics at this point because any damage has already been done.
If we, as the west, want to be great, we will have to move beyond the victim stage.
What do you call a man who stole a lathe 50 years ago and spent that entire time learning and using that lathe? Is he still just a thief? Or is he actually now a skilled machinist with immense value and skills?
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.
> 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.
Nobody’s going to pay for a feasibility study in a regulatory climate with sufficient barriers to mining. Canada might have less of that thanks to its resource-extraction economy but it’s a huge problem in the US.
This doesn't even seem that far fetched at this point. The economic influence of the USA is being eroded at every turn. Their military capabilities could very well turn out to be their last hope one day. South America stands virtually no chance against even a decadent USA. It's actually embarrassing how weak South America is.
The problem is that the main military enemy of South America is Other Bits Of South America, especially internal enemies. That's why Costa Rica has no military: can't have a military coup without a military.
It's often hard to beat bulk mining. When you're already mining a quarter billion tons of iron and 5B tons of coal, you get a decent amount of all other trace(rare-earth) metals as part of that stream.
It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.
>I really would like to see answers to the four questions at the end
The bottom line is that China has the biggest most economical tungsten reserves, they have been able to flood the market with predatory pricing for the last 40 years and they almost completely control the ore processing bottleneck as well.
For this to change the US govt would have to enter major agreements w US mines, offering relaxed permitting and a guaranteed price
Textbook whataboutism. I agree that US BigTech strategy of dumping free product is predatory and arguably a regulatory failure (or success, depending on your values and goals). But that's got absolutely nothing to do with the current discussion.
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.
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.
Between 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.
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.
Between 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
Literally 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.
What you said there is all true, but largely because you didn't mention efficiency. If your heat source is a lot hotter than the steam you make, you do lose a lot of efficiency. If you had a million degree heat source, you could have many steps extracting huge amounts of power before your "waste" heat gets down to 1000C and is used to boil water.
The part about bad conduction being a problem is nonsense. The "lucky to get 1% efficiency" is not nonsense.
Carnot efficiency is 1 - Tc/Th, where Th is the hot side temperature and Tc is the cold side temperature. Tc is set by the surrounding environment, probably in the vicinity of 300K. If you have a hot side temperature around 1,000,000K then the theoretical maximum efficiency is very good. If that heat has to be stepped down by separating it from materials that would melt and you can only sustain a hot side temperature of 1200K, then your theoretical maximum efficiency drops to 75%. Obviously the real life efficiency will be a bit less than that, but the principle shows that the "lucky to get 1% efficiency" bit is nonsense - you're not actually losing that much after all.
This is all about getting energy out of a very hot heat source. Theoretical efficiency is ~1, and a ~40% practical efficiency also doesn't seem to be hard: let something heat up to 1000C, and don't let much of the energy escape to the environment.
Also deuterium-tritium reactors get energy out of the plasma via capturing high energy neutrons, very similarly to nuclear power plants.
> We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor.
This isn't true.
I understand why you said it. Always 5 years away from being 5 years away. Years and years and years of nothing and hopecasting. Post-COVID market and startup antics. Data center power antics. Well-educated people pointing out BS and that even the best shots we had were example systems that were designed to be briefly net-positive in the 2030s.
But it's just not true.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Book it. 2027. They've hit every milestone, on time, since I started tracking in...2018?
My 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.
If 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.
> 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.
People 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.
But 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.
> 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 byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
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.
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
... you know when you put it that way, it would not surprise me if lobbyists dovetailed the 'cant do stuff in US/EU because of env regs' with the various types of Union busting the US likes to do and for some in the EU it would be the perfect scapegoat for...
Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.
No I mean "we" as in the EU, definitely not the US. The US is sliding back fast, being the only country to pull out of the paris accord (which itself was only the bare minimum needed to halt climate change)
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
TBH papering over xenophobia is easy because it's just foreigners. Problem with mining is extractors are scarring mother earth, that's the unfortunate optics problem for nimby's, not people, but landscape/backyard, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that's why fracking gets an easier pass, because the hole is smol.
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.
Having 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.
The 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.
Then make laws and punish the people who break them. It doesn't do any good to litigate before the project has even started. DUI is a problem and you solve it by arresting drunk drivers, not making them fill out paperwork before they go to the bar.
Your proposal is to do nothing and then make sure the entire thing causes orders of magnitude greater costs and damage which can be irreparable for centuries.
That has ALREADY been tried, and it was an absolute disaster, killing people, wrecking lives, and wrecking vast areas of ecosystems including driving species to extinction. You clearly were not around when rivers literally caught fire or when pollution required entire areas of cities and towns to be evacuated and dug up (look up Superfund Sites), costing taxpayers hundreds of $Billions.
A billion dollar mining operation is not a quick trip to a bar, and it is not putting personal liberties at risk to require planning.
It is far better to PLAN ahead and AGREE on the requirements up front so the company and investors can make sound profit projections and the ecosystem is protected. It is far worse for everyone to let them cause irreparable damage then hit the company/investors with crushing legal actions after the fact.
Yes, I agree that such reviews need to be expedited, the delay does no one any good. But doing the reviews is crucial.
Please read some history and lookup Chesterton's Fence before whinging about topics of which you are clearly ignorant
> 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.
Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.
At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.
The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
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.
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...
They'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.
This 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.
That 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.
Originally 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:
The 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.
Tungsten 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.
> 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.
> 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.
For one thing that document argues that one of the single greatest costs to citizens of immigration is somehow a benefit: increased housing costs. They talk of higher property tax collections from increased home values, this is just another way to say immigration is increasing housing costs and taxes for native population.
The Federal Reserve confirmed this a couple years ago that housing inflation was in part due to a large increase in immigrant population over last few years.
> we've allowed millions of foreigners to come in and raise said healthcare and housing costs
They also raise your GDP by a lot more than they cost.
Australia and New Zealand have about 30% foreign born population, and we do fine.
Maybe add 100 million more people into the US before you would have problems that get difficult.
The biggest cost of healthcare is staff, and a lot of the staff here come from overseas so it's kinda self-sustaining (in the short term). The biggest cost of housing is people whinging and whining about it. NZ and AU does build plenty of housing (land isn't a constraint). Many people in the building industry were born overseas.
It isn't all rainbows, but it mostly works for us.
The US has about 290 million native-born citizens and 25 million naturalized citizens. It has maybe 15 million unauthorized immigrants (of which approx 80% are of working age).
One should always compare population densities, rather than absolute numbers.
Foreigners competing for jobs and housing stock and territory is bad for current citizens. Add to it the political effect of shifting the politics away from national and citizen interests and towards more support for foreigner interests, and it's worse.
The net fiscal impact from the cohort of immigrants we get now is negative; they cost taxpayers more than they contribute. They take more from welfare and social services than than they pay in and more than current citizens. Additionally there is increased crime. There are so many of these that are not adding any economic benefit period, and for those that do, that benefit accrues to a small subset of business owners and politicians, not the general population of citizens. H1B expansion of foreign worker visas for example is bad for displaced American workers. The mindset that considers their own fellow citizens lacking such that they want to replace them with foreigners is insane to me. None of these western countries needs something such that they must get it from others; they can cultivate all of this from their own people, and birthrates would increase if not for the crowding out through increased costs especially housing, insurance, and depressed wages from importation of immigrants.
When I drive on the roads, when I shop for housing or apartments, when I want to pay for car insurance, when I got public spaces, parks, cities, vacation spots, got to stores.... I've never ever had the thought "You know what would make my quality of life better? If we had 100 million more people especially those that come from a different culture and speak a different language here and everywhere else right now". That is such a ridiculously foolish mindset, and disservice to one's own neighbors and such. Makes no sense to me.
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.
Very 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.
>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.
The 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.
Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.
Now 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?
Good 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.
There 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.
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.
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.
That'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.
Problem 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.
My 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.
A key aspect is being able to read the geology of the ore body. That is still more of an art than a science. If you are a nerd, it is actually super-interesting. Not too hard to pick up if you have the interest. It isn’t for the casual investor though. In the US there is a regulatory thicket you have to get through to develop it, and it often isn’t cheap, which factors into the value of the minerals.
I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.
Caught 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.
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)
My 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.
Counterpoint: 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.
FYI, 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.
China 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.
its 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.
High 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.
Strange...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!
MisterTea | a month ago
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
[OP] noleary | a month ago
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/...
[2] https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/tungsten-m...
bell-cot | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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.
Tuna-Fish | a month ago
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 mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them. They are "working inventory" of mines that have been developed, they are not our understanding of how the minerals are distributed. They are also a function of commodity prices, not something that remains constant unless you dig them.
China has so much of the worldwide production and reserves because mining is an extremely capital-intensive industry, that is also sensitive to labor costs and environmental legislation. For a long time, China had the trifecta of lax legislation, cheap labor, and sufficient political stability to attract investment. US or Europe can't compete because mining there is more expensive, the third world can't compete because people are wary of investing billions into projects that might go to zero for political stability reasons.
Should the market prices of key minerals rise to the point where it makes sense to mine them outside of China, reserves will be developed and production will shift. This will probably require political will to either tariff Chinese production or subsidize production outside China, because so far China has wielded mineral exports as a weapon only for brief periods, being careful to release exports to crater prices often enough to kill competing projects.
a2tech | a month ago
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 questions in that scenario are 1) who will work these mines? The US is running at very high employment right now, and mining is very hard work 2) where would our ore refinement equipment and skills come from? China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them. They have infrastructure to BUILD the infrastructure for ore extraction and refinement. My understanding is that they're uninterested in selling that currently 3) then all the other local issues like where will they be able to sell locals on building giant mines, dealing with the heavy traffic, potential environmental concerns, etc.
hunterpayne | a month ago
> 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.
MisterTea | a month ago
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.
maxglute | a month ago
runsWphotons | a month ago
maxglute | a month ago
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
fc417fc802 | a month ago
Not even close. EUV lithography is as close to magic as it gets. By any reasonable assessment it shouldn't work but a few wizards somehow manage to pull it off.
maxglute | a month ago
The execution difference is PRC is generating enough semi talent to replicate EUV and entire semi stack sooner than later. They already have the most complete localized semi supply chain in single nation, i.e. they're doing ASML+5000 niche suppliers at once. Hence consensus estimate is they'll get there somewhere 2030-2035. Reminder EUV is basically a "tiny" ass effort from a handful of countries, for reference airbus/boeing each has 150k employees for commercial aviation, EUV was developed by 3k from Zeiss, 1k from Cymer, 13k from ASML... over 20 years of casual development. It's ultimately a hard but narrow specialization problem, hence PRC EUV prototype beating estimates/expectations. It's not magic, it's just people + cash + industrial vertical integration that PRC is uniquely well equipped to deal with.
VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute. M/HREE is ~20 minerals each has it's own midstream extraction process that require dozens of plants and 100s of stages for 5/6/7+ sigma high end strategic use. It's a different monumental/gargantuan task, on top of the sheer fucking scale of infra involved. I noted Batou has 3 million residents for a reason, that's the scale of M/HREE industry west has to replicate. It takes 8-10 years to get a refinery up in the west, the chance of west getting 100s of highly polluting industrial chains up for M/HREE before PRC sorts out semi is close to zero. It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with. I'd wager M/HREE more bureaucratic magic than even EUV technical magic for west.
Meanwhile, there isn't a single M/HREE plant in western pipeline that will do anything at scale until maybe 2030, only thing in pipeline is validating unproven lab extraction/refining methods by ~2028, if it works, will take years to scale extraction, and even more years to scale refining.
fc417fc802 | a month ago
You illustrate a fundamental lack of understanding. 9 women can't produce a single baby in one month. That's just not how it works.
I think you really don't appreciate how utterly ridiculous the implementation details of the smaller lithography processes are. It wasn't merely limited to the west, it was limited to a single company.
> VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute.
Wrong. The west currently lacks investors willing to shift focus to that extent and the state lacks the willingness to divert resources and step in themselves.
> It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with.
It's not that the west is unable. We don't currently have sufficient motivation to overcome the political barriers that prevent speed.
I agree that retooling for that would take many years due to the scale of the physical infrastructure involved, and in practice will likely take multiple decades due to lack of urgency. Where I disagree is the comparison with EUV.
maxglute | a month ago
Lack of willingness/urgency is just loser talk for last of system capacity, i.e. overcome political barriers, especially when it's been highlighted how strategic important it is to hammer out separate REE chain. Important to distinguish between unwillingness and simple inability. Easy to strong arm TW to TSMC Arizona for leading edge goals, but can't strong arm PRC to transfer M/HREE tech.
Note I didn't say M/HREE was "easier" than EUV in technical sense. I said in terms of execution, i.e. overcoming barriers, PRC is simply going to have easier working with EUV engineering problem than west with M/HREE engineering, massive infra, domestic politics problem. So it's going to be slow going, in terms of execution time.
fc417fc802 | a month ago
An economic superpower identified cutting edge lithography in general as a national priority, allocated the resources, and after something like two decades of intensive research is _still_ trailing by many years. I can't immediately think of any other commercialized technology with a similar difficulty level.
As for REE, political willingness is entirely orthogonal from physical capability. A bunch of hot air on the evening news is irrelevant. If the politicians don't allocate the funds then they clearly don't see it as a top priority. If there were a pressing need then it would get done.
Where we really see the political dysfunction is the lack of planning for the future. By the time it's an urgent need there won't be enough time left for the buildout. But that's unrelated to the topic at hand.
dv_dt | a month ago
pseudohadamard | a month ago
Dylan16807 | a month ago
throwway120385 | a month ago
FpUser | a month ago
matheusmoreira | a month ago
Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.
I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.
clarionbell | a month ago
He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.
West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.
It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.
navigate8310 | a month ago
cucumber3732842 | a month ago
"Fell for it" looks a lot like "basically compelled by the economic impacts of public policy and political winds" so far as I can tell.
Some man in a C-suite in 2002 who was wrestling with a decision to refresh domestic factories with capital investments that would pay off over the next 15yr and be competitive for 30 or build new in China could only make that decision one way without being ousted by his own board. Even if the economics barely penciled out positively after compliance costs the political winds made it too risky.
I mean, yeah, someone fell for it. The public, the politicians, etc. etc. But it's not like anyone who didn't have to grapple with the numbers didn't know what they were doing was suspect at best, though many of course deluded themselves into believing in it.
How many decades and dollars did we spend shipping trash plastic overseas because they provided us with receipts saying they were recycling it when they were landfilling, burning or dumping it? Everyone who knew the chemistry and energy prices knew it didn't really work but still, it happened.
FpUser | a month ago
Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow
7thpower | a month ago
Every time there is a discussion about how China is wiping the floor with the west, someone wants to chime in that they stole IP. It is an unhealthy fixation and betrays the fact that they are genuinely more efficient in many cases, even when labor costs and subsidies are removed.
Not to mention, complaining about China stealing IP is a pacifier. Even where true, it does not change the competitive dynamics at this point because any damage has already been done.
If we, as the west, want to be great, we will have to move beyond the victim stage.
AngryData | a month ago
maxglute | a month ago
>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.
nullhole | a month ago
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.
philwelch | a month ago
petre | a month ago
Easy one, then. The administration will kidnap the president of Bolivia, install a replacement and strike a minerals deal.
matheusmoreira | a month ago
pjc50 | a month ago
(also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War was so devastating that nobody wants to get back to that point)
aeternum | a month ago
It's far easier to just collect tungsten as it rolls down your conveyor belt.
kbelder | a month ago
user____name | a month ago
CGMthrowaway | a month ago
The bottom line is that China has the biggest most economical tungsten reserves, they have been able to flood the market with predatory pricing for the last 40 years and they almost completely control the ore processing bottleneck as well.
For this to change the US govt would have to enter major agreements w US mines, offering relaxed permitting and a guaranteed price
gmerc | a month ago
fc417fc802 | a month ago
giantg2 | a month ago
This is true for just about any industrial due to the environmental regulation disparity.
josefritzishere | a month ago
burnt-resistor | a month ago
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5ae385eae4b0e2c2dd3...
The site loads very, very slowly.
tomondev | a month ago
irishcoffee | a month ago
America depended on China to not care about the environment or people. China is pretty good at that.
actionfromafar | a month ago
Hikikomori | a month ago
irishcoffee | a month ago
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.
Gravityloss | a month ago
01100011 | a month ago
It may take a while, but one day our old landfills will turn into mines.
Gigachad | a month ago
dmurray | a month ago
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...
bell-cot | a month ago
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 | a month ago
HelloUsername | a month ago
a2tech | a month ago
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.
[OP] noleary | a month ago
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 | a month ago
cumquat | a month ago
red369 | a month ago
carshodev | a month ago
themanmaran | a month ago
If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!
dfee | a month ago
iugtmkbdfil834 | a month ago
pelagicAustral | a month ago
emmelaich | a month ago
qwertox | a month ago
hunterpayne | a month ago
dotancohen | a month ago
hunterpayne | a month ago
ben_w | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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.
Dylan16807 | a month ago
The part about bad conduction being a problem is nonsense. The "lucky to get 1% efficiency" is not nonsense.
mnw21cam | a month ago
bmacho | a month ago
Also deuterium-tritium reactors get energy out of the plasma via capturing high energy neutrons, very similarly to nuclear power plants.
Dylan16807 | a month ago
refulgentis | a month ago
[OP] noleary | a month ago
I can only ever make material conditional claims about things like this :)
montyanne | a month ago
Far from a slam dunk, but I don’t think we’re as far from net gain as we were 10 years ago.
BigTTYGothGF | a month ago
Very carefully.
refulgentis | a month ago
This isn't true.
I understand why you said it. Always 5 years away from being 5 years away. Years and years and years of nothing and hopecasting. Post-COVID market and startup antics. Data center power antics. Well-educated people pointing out BS and that even the best shots we had were example systems that were designed to be briefly net-positive in the 2030s.
But it's just not true.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Book it. 2027. They've hit every milestone, on time, since I started tracking in...2018?
emmelaich | a month ago
BizarroLand | a month ago
ErroneousBosh | a month ago
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 | a month ago
djoldman | a month ago
rsync | a month ago
Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?
ericmay | a month ago
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 | a month ago
a2tech | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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.
tbossanova | a month ago
RupertSalt | a month ago
> some bright bulb
I see what you did there
wolvoleo | a month ago
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 byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
orochimaaru | a month ago
estearum | a month ago
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.
tbossanova | a month ago
buckle8017 | a month ago
All products from China are manufactured with electricity that is largely coal.
You just mean it's not economical.
Saline9515 | a month ago
buckle8017 | a month ago
I don't do it because I accept that my keyboard was made with coal.
But I would prefer my keyboard was made in America burning American coal.
j16sdiz | a month ago
Kind of. China is at 55% Coal and 40% Renewable, with renewable climbing each year.
Compare to USA 40% Gas, 20% Coal, 20% Renewable, with renewable more or less steady.
to11mtm | a month ago
JSR_FDED | a month ago
wolvoleo | a month ago
pests | a month ago
You might be thinking of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.
maxglute | a month ago
ericmay | a month ago
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
maxglute | a month ago
seg_lol | a month ago
Night_Thastus | a month ago
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 | a month ago
throwway120385 | a month ago
buckle8017 | a month ago
The acid is natural btw just from things leeching out of the rock walls.
terminalshort | a month ago
toss1 | a month ago
terminalshort | a month ago
toss1 | a month ago
That has ALREADY been tried, and it was an absolute disaster, killing people, wrecking lives, and wrecking vast areas of ecosystems including driving species to extinction. You clearly were not around when rivers literally caught fire or when pollution required entire areas of cities and towns to be evacuated and dug up (look up Superfund Sites), costing taxpayers hundreds of $Billions.
A billion dollar mining operation is not a quick trip to a bar, and it is not putting personal liberties at risk to require planning.
It is far better to PLAN ahead and AGREE on the requirements up front so the company and investors can make sound profit projections and the ecosystem is protected. It is far worse for everyone to let them cause irreparable damage then hit the company/investors with crushing legal actions after the fact.
Yes, I agree that such reviews need to be expedited, the delay does no one any good. But doing the reviews is crucial.
Please read some history and lookup Chesterton's Fence before whinging about topics of which you are clearly ignorant
quotemstr | a month ago
mschuster91 | a month ago
Because, surprise, we do not want more Superfund sites. Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far.
At the same time, it is very convenient that there are lots of piss poor countries that have very difficult/dirty to mine resources... be it China, Congo or whatever. These countries didn't have the luxury to think decades into the future, and capitalism doesn't have built-in ethics, and this is how we ended up here.
The EU tried to introduce supply chain laws aiming at cutting back at this kind of exploitation, but the pressure from industry was immense.
Octoth0rpe | a month ago
Source? My understanding was that NJ was the worse.
Wikipedia shows 94 SF sites in CA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_Cal...
And 115 in NJ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites_in_New...
And of course, CA is _much much_ larger. If we look at the entire bos/wash corridor, it's huuugely than CA.
terminalshort | a month ago
Supermancho | a month ago
incahoots | a month ago
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 | a month ago
tehjoker | a month ago
Just a nitpick, but it is the reverse, the United States has become more adversarial. China isn't kidnapping heads of state.
strangegecko | a month ago
FpUser | a month ago
Well, they have wonderful mentor
Saline9515 | a month ago
https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...
queenkjuul | a month ago
Also, nobody forced US companies to sell those assets.
dwd | a month ago
The history and asset ownership is also quite convoluted. Try this Wikipedia article:
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-...
Saline9515 | a month ago
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.
SV_BubbleTime | a month ago
Same as it ever was.
SoftTalker | a month ago
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 | a month ago
https://www.usgs.gov/tools/critical-minerals-atlas
sholladay | a month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
chwtutha | a month ago
goopypoop | a month ago
h4kunamata | a month ago
Tungsten won't matter when there is no country.
PKop | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
We definitely should do this, yes.
dtauzell | a month ago
pstuart | a month ago
PKop | a month ago
The Federal Reserve confirmed this a couple years ago that housing inflation was in part due to a large increase in immigrant population over last few years.
PKop | a month ago
queenkjuul | a month ago
robocat | a month ago
They also raise your GDP by a lot more than they cost.
Australia and New Zealand have about 30% foreign born population, and we do fine.
Maybe add 100 million more people into the US before you would have problems that get difficult.
The biggest cost of healthcare is staff, and a lot of the staff here come from overseas so it's kinda self-sustaining (in the short term). The biggest cost of housing is people whinging and whining about it. NZ and AU does build plenty of housing (land isn't a constraint). Many people in the building industry were born overseas.
It isn't all rainbows, but it mostly works for us.
The US has about 290 million native-born citizens and 25 million naturalized citizens. It has maybe 15 million unauthorized immigrants (of which approx 80% are of working age).
One should always compare population densities, rather than absolute numbers.
PKop | a month ago
The net fiscal impact from the cohort of immigrants we get now is negative; they cost taxpayers more than they contribute. They take more from welfare and social services than than they pay in and more than current citizens. Additionally there is increased crime. There are so many of these that are not adding any economic benefit period, and for those that do, that benefit accrues to a small subset of business owners and politicians, not the general population of citizens. H1B expansion of foreign worker visas for example is bad for displaced American workers. The mindset that considers their own fellow citizens lacking such that they want to replace them with foreigners is insane to me. None of these western countries needs something such that they must get it from others; they can cultivate all of this from their own people, and birthrates would increase if not for the crowding out through increased costs especially housing, insurance, and depressed wages from importation of immigrants.
When I drive on the roads, when I shop for housing or apartments, when I want to pay for car insurance, when I got public spaces, parks, cities, vacation spots, got to stores.... I've never ever had the thought "You know what would make my quality of life better? If we had 100 million more people especially those that come from a different culture and speak a different language here and everywhere else right now". That is such a ridiculously foolish mindset, and disservice to one's own neighbors and such. Makes no sense to me.
phendrenad2 | a month ago
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.
maxglute | a month ago
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 | a month ago
I didn’t realize the tips were tungsten carbide either.
dexwiz | a month ago
kbelder | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 (process for the balls starts around 1:50)
maxglute | a month ago
fnord77 | a month ago
icegreentea2 | a month ago
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.
trebligdivad | a month ago
Come buy our tungsten! (We'll throw in a choice of Eccles cake or Tunnocks tea cakes as a special offer)
riwsky | a month ago
david927 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
throwup238 | a month ago
russdill | a month ago
throwup238 | a month ago
kasperset | a month ago
https://archive.ph/YgRUv
Original Link: https://www.wsj.com/business/the-defense-department-is-infat...
Animats | a month ago
It's worse than the wannabe rare earth mining companies.
[1] https://www.unitedstatestungsten.com/
[2] https://investornews.com/critical-minerals-rare-earths/ameri...
[3] https://www.patriotcritical.com/
dwd | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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 | a month ago
lightedman | a month ago
You'd be surprised how many of us actually have a mining claim or two ;)
55555 | a month ago
This is not to assume that the parent commenter invested for this reason.
dwd | a month ago
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 | a month ago
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.
jandrewrogers | a month ago
I built a small catalog of ore deposits primarily by hiking deep into areas of the US mountain west that no one has gone into, albeit not for the purposes of prospecting. There is still quite a bit out there. Mostly gold-copper ores in my case.
ridgeguy | a month ago
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 | a month ago
In WW2 all sides needed more tungsten, hence: 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 | a month ago
anigbrowl | a month ago
[OP] noleary | a month ago
[1] https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/t...
[2] https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/
anigbrowl | a month ago
mullingitover | a month ago
[1] https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/charting-china/2025/02/...
yanhangyhy | a month ago
Animats | a month ago
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-ch...
[2] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/beyond-beijing-the-uneas...
[3] https://logistics.maritimeprofessional.com/transport-infrast...
[4] https://www.coreconsultantsgroup.com/tungsten-market-outlook...
kopirgan | a month ago
nephihaha | a month ago
Maybe part of their plan is to have tungsten while exhausting everyone else's‽
samspot | a month ago