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.
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).
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.
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?
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.)
It's not that uncommon to keep the "CTO" title and not be the primary manager of the engineering organization. There are all kinds of things you can do with the org chart. If I recall correctly, Clickhouse works this way.
The company's cofounders comprise three people [1]:
* Aaron, a sales-oriented CEO from Elastic and Salesforce
* Alexey, the original Clickhouse developer, as CTO
* Yury, an experienced engineering executive from Google/Netflix as "President"
An excerpt from the launch announcement [2]:
> While negotiations were still ongoing, Katz decided they needed a third co-founder. “I kept thinking, if I could get a third co-founder to run product and engineering, and if I could find someone with the same level of experience building distributed systems on open-source that I have on go-to-market, it could be a really compelling combination,” Katz says.
Ontario Teachers' is a pretty active principal in venture/growth financings and a major LP to a bunch of funds.
That said, venture/growth is a pretty small percentage of their holdings.
Imagine two different password strength standards:
1. Just a 4 digit numeric PIN like `1981`
2. A 20 character upper/lower/numeric/special-character password like `qmd1tkf7mwa.PQB0qrz$`
--
The PIN has lower entropy and is therefore a lot easier to brute force.
I haven't calculated this stuff myself -- I just used Wolfram Alpha -- but it looks like the PIN would take <1 second to brute force, while the 20 character password would take 7.6 * 10^25 years. [1] [2]
It seems to lean more into transactional email than being a 1:1 Substack clone, but I have heard good things about Dittofeed [1]. It's pretty self-hosting friendly, all things considered. [2]
We went with Substack basically because it's really easy to newsletters live on as webpages, but if you're going through the trouble to self host and build a website anyway, Dittofeed might be a good fit.
[1] https://www.fastmarkets.com/metals-and-mining/minor-metals/t...
[2] https://quoteddata.com/glossary/mtu/
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