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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
by noleary 7mo ago
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.
- stevenwoo 7mo agoThe formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.
- cumquat 7mo agoLandscape mode helps.
- red369 7mo agoI found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).
- carshodev 7mo agoI also can recommend material world. Its a great look at how mining and material production works worldwide, I also do not think it covers Tungsten.
- themanmaran 7mo ago> Not an expert or a nefarious actor If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!
- dfee 7mo agoisn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo agoI mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.
- pelagicAustral 7mo agoAs an non-expert myself, that's exactly what I would do.
- emmelaich 7mo agoI for one am not leery of noleary.
- qwertox 7mo agowe'll let it slip, this one time.
- IhateAI_3 7mo ago[dead]
- hunterpayne 7mo agoNice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.
- dotancohen 7mo ago> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.
- hunterpayne 7mo agoI said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.
- ben_w 7mo agoWhile true in isolation, that is the wrong reason to care. We get power from the sun very effectively over 150 billion meters of vacuum. Biggest problem with fusion is doing the fusion for a low enough input power (or for pulsed, energy) cost.
- bmacho 7mo agoLiterally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy. If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
- NedF 7mo ago[dead]
- emmelaich 7mo agoTo what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
- BizarroLand 7mo agoMy guess is that while it is running it will dump spare neutrons into the tungsten, converting the tungsten into exotic materials that are not fit for task for various reasons.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoIf you whack enough neutrons into it, you'll eventually get Rhenium and Osmium. Both are actually pretty useful and while not actually dangerous you might not want to get any on you, especially if it's still hot from the reactor. Osmium in powder form will oxidise to osmium tetroxide, and you want to avoid that because it stains just about any kind of plant or animal tissue including the surface of your eyes, and is spectacularly poisonous.
- gkanai 7mo agoYou may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.
- djoldman 7mo agoI'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.
- rsync 7mo agoIt's a website about metals. Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do ?