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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend.

I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.

The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.

Landscape mode helps.

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

I also can recommend material world. Its a great look at how mining and material production works worldwide, I also do not think it covers Tungsten.

> Not an expert or a nefarious actor

If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!

isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p

I mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.

As an non-expert myself, that's exactly what I would do.

I for one am not leery of noleary.

we'll let it slip, this one time.

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.

  > how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat?

The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.

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

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

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

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

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.

You're right, I was mixing up how the boiling process would work numerically.

Okay, now I'm thinking you're trolling :) (if not: how warm is it where you are, i.e. how much above 0 kelvin? How?)

I'm not smart enough to stake an opinion on the viability of fusion. I pretty much only have high school mechanics and Wikipedia in my toolkit.

I can only ever make material conditional claims about things like this :)

Commonwealth fusion is theoretically pretty close with their high temp superconductors.

Far from a slam dunk, but I don’t think we’re as far from net gain as we were 10 years ago.

> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat

Very carefully.

> 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?

To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?

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.

You may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.

I'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.

It's a website about metals.

Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?

> 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.

A good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".

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.

Might be able to run a tank on battery one day. Fighter jet seems harder though

> tungsten

> some bright bulb

I see what you did there

> 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

What are you talking about its trivial to avoid purchasing product's produced in environmentally unfriendly ways.

All products from China are manufactured with electricity that is largely coal.

You just mean it's not economical.

Are you trying to say that it's trivial to avoid buying Chinese manufactured products? Where is the keyboard you are typing on made, by the way?

Sure it's trivial, but it's inconvenient and expensive.

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.

> electricity that is largely coal.

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.

Brother if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

... 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)

> a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.

You might be thinking of Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China.

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.

Don't make China the boogey man here, when it was America's rich that exported all those things (jobs, manufacturing, solid supply chains) to China.

It's a frequent pattern of:

1: "We need to be more self-sufficient with minerals!"

2: "Let's try to kick-start more of our own industry digging it up!"

3: "Wow, that's expensive and can't compete with international prices."

4: "Better shut it down!"

5: Goto 1

Without ever getting that the point was never to be as profitable as overseas sources. Or getting the point and ignoring it.

The worst part is that most of number 3 is self imposed by the ridiculous amount of environmental review and litigation delays surrounding that process. Sure, cost of labor is some of it, but really it's not very much in comparison.

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.

That pit also happens to be a great place to do rare earths extraction since there is zero chance of it ever being cleaned up.

The acid is natural btw just from things leeching out of the rock walls.

Mine the metal or do without the tech that uses it. You have to choose. Years of environmental review do not help.

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

Who cares? There's a ton of land out there.

> 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.

> Like, the Silicon Valley is the US' biggest cluster of Superfund sites by far

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.

If SV is full of superfund sites then I guess they aren't as bad as I thought because millions of people live there and are doing just fine.

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.

>Now that China has become more adversarial

I think it's the other way around here. I say that as China's policy has primarily focused on self-reliance to the degree that it's overshadowed the west in several sectors with the exception of a few (Tech/AI, Finance, Bio) and given their persistence to close the gap I'd say we aren't too far from being eclipsed entirely.

One just has to look at the economics of it all and come to the conclusion that many have already arrived at...

cough Wolf warrior diplomacy cough

> Now that China has become more adversarial

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

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.

>"China has been using economic blackmail to advance political goals"

Well, they have wonderful mentor

Probably just Big W trying to run the markets.

Same as it ever was.

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.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/07/the-saga-of-magneque...

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:

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-...

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.

I read the article, i know what it says.

OP claimed the Chinese bought a mine, and that the article was about REE extraction. Those weren't accurate statements.

(Oh, you're OP. You posted an article that didn't back up your claims, sorry not sorry)

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