[HN Gopher] The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factor...
___________________________________________________________________
The semiconductor industry hinges on a quartz factory in North
Carolina
Author : speckx
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-03-25 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| chasil wrote:
| There have been past articles on this subject.
|
| 2009:
| https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglas...
|
| 2013: https://siliconmountain.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/ultra-
| pure-...
|
| 2018: https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-
| pu...
|
| 2019: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-
| chi...
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Goldman Sachs should buy them out.
| whycome wrote:
| Nah. Morgan Stanley. Diversification. They're the ones that
| bought all the Chicago parking meters.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Ideally it would be a private equity, so they would be immune
| from reporting obligations.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters
|
| for those not in the know. Chicago basically sold all revenue
| from their parking meters to Saudi Arabia for the next 75
| years. Not basically, that is exactly what happened.
| lukan wrote:
| "Chicago basically sold all revenue from their parking
| meters to Saudi Arabia for the next 75 years."
|
| According to your wiki link, only 25% are owned by a Saudi
| Arabian company. The rest is mostly US.
|
| Or is Morgan Stanley owned by Saudi Arabia now?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| TL;DR: it's complicated[0]. Also, you're right - I'm
| mistakenly conflating SA with the UAE.
|
| [0]https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/164hefi/comm
| ent/jy...
| shtack wrote:
| Similarly the Canadian province of Ontario leased it's only
| toll highway for 99 years to an international group, for an
| amount it currently earns in tolls every ~2 years. Fun.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| You're missing the bigger picture though. By doing so
| they managed to look like they had balanced the budget in
| an election year. That's what really matters here.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Earns, or receives in revenue?
|
| 'Earns' implies net profit after all expenses (including
| operations and maintenance), which I find hard to believe
| in this specific case.
| selectodude wrote:
| Abu Dhabi isn't in Saudi Arabia.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The UAE is a completely different country than Saudi
| Arabia, the article doesn't mention Saudi Arabia at all, it
| claims that the sovereign wealth fund of the Emirate of Abu
| Dhabi in the UAE indirectly owns ~25% of the company that
| bought the parking revenue, and the article's total of
| direct ownership claims adds up to 123.408%, which is
| somewhat improbable and calls into question the other
| ownership claims.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Interesting - paid $1.15B and currently up $0.5B with 60
| years to go, so the meters are generating $1.65B per 15
| years, which'll be $8.25B (assuming no price increases)
| over the 75 years.
|
| If you do the math, going from $1.15B to $8.25B in 75 years
| is only a 2.66% annual rate of return.
|
| I wonder if the Saudi's saw this as a good investment, or a
| good PR deal ?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why assume no price increases? Also, parking meters in a
| car centric region seem like they would be closer to
| government bonds than equities in terms of risk profile,
| so the return would need to be compared to something like
| that.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I just meant the math assumes no price increases. I'd
| have to guess that there are some agreed-upon price
| increases in the deal (2.66% too unattractive), and I see
| there was a recent failed lawsuit by Chicago drivers
| protesting high prices (downtown $7/hr), so they probably
| have gone up.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I don't live there any more and that still makes my blood
| boil. I especially loved the politicians who voted in favor
| and claimed they did not have time to read the legislation.
| "I'm not corrupt, just incompetent"
| tivert wrote:
| > Goldman Sachs should buy them out.
|
| And sell it to China for a tidy profit.
| sethammons wrote:
| The quartz being formed when Africa and North Carolina were one
| and pressed up against one another is really neat. Similar, NC is
| the only major source in the US for emeralds for the same reason.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| These types of articles/pronouncement always tend to make a
| connection that is nearly never warranted. That is, the article
| quotes this tweet that says "The modern economy rests on a single
| road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two
| mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make
| the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers." But the first
| sentence doesn't really follow from the second.
|
| That is, even if all the silicon wafers are made from this quartz
| from NC today, it's not really because that is the only possible
| option, it's because that quartz is the highest quality that can
| be procured at a relatively low price. But if that factory and
| quarry went away tomorrow, I have no doubt that the worldwide
| semiconductor industry would quickly adjust to a different quartz
| supplier.
|
| I think it's still a very cool factoid, but the subtext that "the
| whole world economy 'hinges' on a teeny NC town" is false.
| chasil wrote:
| This is addressed at the end of the article.
|
| "...Mollick makes it clear in his social media thread that,
| yes, fully synthetic techniques are available to create
| similarly pure quartz. However, any sudden closure or
| interruption of the mining at Spruce Pine would likely cause
| "pretty catastrophic" disruption (and extra expense) for a few
| years as the industry scales up manufacturing."
|
| I understand that 25% of all neon production was coming out of
| Mariupol, Ukraine (and another 25% out of Odessa) prior to the
| war. It would be interesting to see how the industry coped with
| a 50% loss of supply.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-ukraine-halts-h...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Even then, I disagree with the characterization in that last
| sentence.
|
| When billions (trillions?) of dollars are on the line, people
| and organizations tend to move with a degree of urgency not
| seen in the normal course of business.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| I agree that it wouldn't be catastrophic, but we just saw a
| semiconductor shortage during COVID. For a lot of us end-
| users, that mainly meant that we couldn't get a Raspberry
| Pi, but it did affect some industries where a lot of Micro-
| controllers (including simple 8-bit AVRs) and even stuff
| like ADC/DACs weren't available at all or only for way
| jacked up prices for a while. I think the automotive
| industry also suffered from that despite all their money
| because they couldn't just swing a magic wand to make a
| chip foundry appear in their backyard.
|
| But in the end, everything was fine because as you say,
| eventually everyone is going to move.
| TylerE wrote:
| It doesn't sound like this would cause any short term
| pain really, just make it harder to spin up new capacity.
| dopylitty wrote:
| Was everything fine in the end?
|
| We would probably never hear about it if for a completely
| made up example an extra 10k people died because some
| medical device was being made without some microprocessor
| that made it more effective or reliable.
|
| It's possible for things with large scale effects to have
| large impacts without it becoming well known by people
| not working in the affected industry or directly
| impacted.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| It's a good point - I was more talking about society as a
| whole, since we didn't collapse. And we wouldn't collapse
| if some Quartz mind in North Carolina closes either.
|
| But yes, on an individual level, it can be severe. Like
| the employees of car manufacturers who lost their jobs
| because they couldn't make cars for a while because they
| didn't have the chips needed.
| tedsanders wrote:
| Even with billions on the line, semiconductor shortages can
| take years to resolve.
|
| Consider the 2020-2023 chip shortage, which hit automakers
| especially hard. When COVID19 struck in 2020, car sales
| plunged by 30%-90%, inducing many automakers to cancel
| future chip orders. Then when demand rebounded unexpectedly
| quickly, automakers found that there were not enough chips
| to buy, nor enough available manufacturing capacity to make
| them.
|
| This shortage of chips was severe. Every major automaker
| (including Toyota,Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and GM)
| were forced to idle manufacturing plants. In 2021 alone,
| the chip shortage reduced auto production by ~11 million
| vehicles, costing an estimated $210B in auto revenue(!). In
| response, the White House convened 3 summits and signed the
| CHIPS and Science Act of 2022.
|
| Building extra semiconductor manufacturing tools takes
| years. Even in late 2022, lead times of various tools were
| as high as 24-30 months, and lead times of some chips were
| still over 100 weeks.
|
| Literally hundreds of billions of dollars of automotive
| revenue (tens of billions of profit) were sitting as a
| prize to anyone who could make some extra chips for
| automakers. And this is a relatively "easy" task -
| automotive is only a small ~10% slice of the semiconductor
| market, and doesn't even need the leading edge technology
| nodes, where production is even more bottlenecked. Yet even
| with this massive prize of billions of dollars, the
| industry couldn't match this demand in under 3 years. It's
| not for lack of skill or effort -- these companies have
| hundreds of thousands of employees, a large fraction with
| advanced degrees -- but simply because the modern
| semiconductor supply chain is fantastically complex.
|
| When designing a supply chain, cost trades off against
| resilience. If you minimize cost (e.g., single sourcing
| crucibles from the lowest cost provider), you lose
| resilience (e.g., it may take you months to recover from
| that single source going offline unexpectedly).
| chasil wrote:
| One easy way for the automakers to solve their problems
| would be to exploit Moore's law, and move all of their
| designs to a 28nm planar node of transistor production
| (which are somewhat more durable than the smaller FINFET
| nodes).
|
| Because many of them were still at 180nm (or higher),
| they wasted the silicon material with a much larger die
| size.
|
| Spend the money to stay current. Nobody is going to mass-
| produce vacuum tubes for you overnight.
| Retric wrote:
| I think the automotive chip shortage actually shows the
| opposite of what you think it does. The industry largely
| shut down, a global pandemic causing massive shipping
| issues for a huge range of components hitting a complex
| industry focused on just in time supply chains and
| complex logistics combined with poor forecasting of
| demand resulted in a _12% reduction in output over a
| year._ Which then quickly caught back up.
|
| That's so wildly far from catastrophe it's laughable,
| economic swings frequently have larger impacts on car
| sales. The pandemic hurt the automobile industry less
| than several others, companies didn't fail, and things
| quickly caught back up.
|
| So yes disruptions mean a temporary reduction in output
| and possibly a significant period catching up, but
| suggesting it would take an industry years to deal with X
| issue just doesn't line up with how companies actually
| behave.
| chasil wrote:
| As I understand it, the "legacy" production capacity that
| the automobile manufacturers canceled/forfeited was
| (re)sold to other customers. When car sales picked up,
| the order books were full and there were were no
| immediately-available fabs.
|
| The foundries did not appear to have as substantial of a
| downturn.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Small correction: billions on the line over the time period
| of the current generation of CEOs' tenures.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Neon supply disruption started earlier with the Donbas war,
| so companies were already adapting to the neon squeeze.
| Approaches used include developing neon production capacity
| outside of Ukraine, optimizing process control to reduce neon
| consumption, and recycling neon gas that would formerly have
| been vented to the atmosphere:
|
| "Gigaphoton Announces Neon Gas Rescue Program" (2015)
|
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150708005017/en/Gig.
| ..
|
| "Linde installs neon production facility at ASU in Texas"
| (2016)
|
| https://www.gasworld.com/story/linde-installs-neon-
| productio...
|
| "Noble gases and the shock of war: Laser and semiconductor
| manufacturers adjust to price increases while securing supply
| chains" (2023)
|
| https://spie.org/news/photonics-
| focus/mayjune-2023/supplying...
|
| "Samsung to use recycled neon gas in chip manufacturing"
| (2024)
|
| https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-
| chipmakers/newsView/ked2024...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Silicon wafers aren't made from that quartz; the crucibles in
| which silicon is melted is. The wafers themselves are made from
| metallurgical silicon that is subsequently converted to
| trichlorosilane, then repeatedly distilled to remove
| impurities, and then converted back to elemental silicon.
|
| If we didn't have sufficiently pure quartz for the crucibles we
| could oxidize some of that purified silicon back into silicon
| dioxide and use that instead.
| chasil wrote:
| The first chemist who performed this process actually went to
| a college near my house.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Marcus_Olson
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This wasn't first? -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39819030
| csours wrote:
| It's kind of like peak oil. It's the price, not the amount. So
| 'peak oil' isn't completely wrong, it's just complicated.
|
| ---
|
| > I think it's still a very cool factoid, but the subtext that
| "the whole world economy 'hinges' on a teeny NC town" --is
| false.--
|
| is oversimplified to the point of being misleading.
| samatman wrote:
| Peak oil is defined in terms of production. When total global
| production decreases, the moment of maximum production will
| be peak oil. Unless of course it's later exceeded, which
| could easily happen.
|
| Why this will happen, when this will happen, and what the
| economic consequences will be, we can only speculate about.
| But it's the amount, not the price.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| You are correct, of course. However, most of those using
| the "peak oil" scare tactic try to pretend that once "peak
| oil" is reached, there will be a sudden and drastic drop in
| oil production.
|
| I think that's what the person you're responding to was
| alluding to.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Other similar articles:
|
| - lithium from Chile
|
| - phosphates from Belarus
|
| - rare earths from China
| notShabu wrote:
| There is a similar fallacy that I've seen many engineers &
| teams fall into. The occupy "critical" roles which without, the
| whole chain would break and everything would fall apart
|
| However often times the project only needs that one critical
| role and can replace it fairly easily. (the on-ramp off-ramp
| costs are lower than the cost of redundancy or other political
| costs)
|
| Ironically, "non-critical" roles can be more important from a
| business narrative or core competency pov.
|
| E.g. "the AI expert/team" leaving breaks the narrative of being
| an AI company even if all they do is non-critical path
| exploratory research. The inability to get new hires breaks the
| narrative of a growth-company etc...
|
| There is more leverage in being able to direct narrative energy
| than in being nominally critical
| klyrs wrote:
| > E.g. "the AI expert/team" leaving breaks the narrative of
| being an AI company even if all they do is non-critical path
| exploratory research.
|
| I find myself in this position (but, not AI). That sole
| researcher doesn't just have "narrative" power. I make
| prototypes which are fleshed out into products by more
| capable engineers. Without me, the team is a bunch of
| engineers with great intuition on engineering and some
| familiarity with my niche -- but not the depth of knowledge
| required for keen intuition. The result would be either
| stagnation, or very inefficient research as an engineer
| attempts to step into the research role, hoping to
| accidentally rediscover decades of specialized knowledge.
|
| An AI company without an AI just won't be able to execute at
| the pace of an AI company with that expert. And likewise, us
| niche experts don't go far without a solid engineering team
| to back us up.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > I think it's still a very cool factoid, but the subtext that
| "the whole world economy 'hinges' on a teeny NC town" is false.
|
| Let them have their mistaken day in the sun, I've no doubt that
| the market would adjust pretty quickly rather than, you know,
| stop making semiconductors forever if this place disappeared
| off the map.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| There's a whole school of "Industry X is totally dependent on
| far flung facility Y" journalism. ("your cellphone depends on
| coltan from African wars" from a few years back is the worst
| offender - not that people shouldn't be concerned with such
| wars but concern should be based on a reasonable lens).
|
| That said, the world has experienced quite a few supply chain
| disruptions in recent years and a big factor is large-scale,
| highly capitalized enterprises wind-up preferring situations of
| not producing at all to situations of increasing or continuing
| production at a lower profit rate for an emergency situation.
| (I remember covid vaccine production was limited by drug
| companies unwillingness to invest in new gene printing
| machines, US hospitals didn't buy US made masks because neither
| the mask manufacturer would make/accept short-term contracts at
| temporarily higher prices, etc. We all whine about AMD's
| unwillingness to compete directly with Nvidia with a Cuda-clone
| system).
|
| Which is say, yes markets generally take risks into account but
| some amount of fragility seems to be a risk markets are willing
| to pay.
| pradn wrote:
| We don't have the vocabulary to separate two ways people use
| "critical": "required for something's functioning", and "not
| substitutable".
|
| A tire is critical to a car's functioning, but there's plenty
| of brands to choose from if one tire company goes bust. Ofc,
| substitutability is a matter of degree - cost/time.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This comment reads like someone that has already forgotten
| about the supply chain nightmare of the past couple of years.
| Yeah, And, So to the idea that other suppliers _can_ , _could_
| , _might_ be available.
|
| How long does it take to suddenly have those suppliers ramp up
| their production to the same levels? How long does it take for
| a new shipper to be found from that new location? How long does
| it take to make any changes to the processing because it's the
| same but different as far as what is coming in?
|
| Switching to a new vendor when you're comparing shopping at
| Walmart, Target, Amazon is not any where close to the same
| thing as receiving raw material from a new vendor for an
| industrial process.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think it's still a very cool factoid, but [...] is false.
|
| Technically, that falsehood is what _makes_ it a factoid, since
| it resembles-but-isn 't a fact, just like how a spheroid is not
| a true sphere, a meteoroid/asteroid isn't a true meteor/star,
| an android/gynoid isn't a true man/woman, and almost every
| other _-oid_ word out there.
|
| Now, there are some philistines out there who claim that
| popular misuse means the "correct" definition of factoid has
| changed recently... But either way, I still find it amusing
| that everyone agrees that "A factoid is a small fact" is itself
| a factoid.
| bl0rg wrote:
| Thank you. Have a great day.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Yes. It's not like similar factories haven't suddenly stopped
| production elsewhere:
|
| https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-an...
|
| It was uncomfortable for a while, but the world didn't end.
| Supply chains adjusted pretty quickly.
| perihelions wrote:
| Tangentially, this looks like a seriously unpleasant neighbor to
| live next to:
|
| - _" Dozens of dead fish have died and are washing up on the
| banks of the North Toe River after a reported hydrofluoric acid
| leak at a Spruce Pine quarry, state officials say."_
|
| https://wlos.com/news/local/dozens-of-fish-in-north-toe-rive...
|
| - _" Officials told people who live within four miles of the
| plant to evacuate their homes because of the fire."_
|
| https://www.blueridgenow.com/story/news/2008/11/30/spruce-pi...
| avalys wrote:
| The global semiconductor manufacturing industry, and all of
| modern society, on the one hand...
|
| Dozens of dead fish on the other. Dozens!
| perihelions wrote:
| I mean, there were also children playing in the hydrofluoric
| acid spill.
|
| - _" Tuesday, moms Katrina Benfield and Nikki Bennett
| returned to the river with their children. They said they had
| all been swimming in the North Toe about 4 p.m. when they
| began to see dead fish float around them and wash ashore."_
|
| - _" "I'm not happy at all," Benfield said. "I had my
| children in here. They fish, we eat the fish.""_
|
| - _" Bennett said everyone got out of the water as soon as
| they saw the dead fish."_
|
| - _" "My daughter actually picked one up and said the scales
| looked like they had been burnt," she said."_
|
| ~
|
| - _" Cecilia McCool, 15, said her eyes began to sting and she
| began to feel light-headed while swimming in the river
| Sunday. Within 10 minutes, she said she began to see the fish
| floating and told friends and family to get out of the
| river."_
| greenavocado wrote:
| Hydrofluoric acid (HF) is a highly corrosive and dangerous
| substance that can pass through the skin and into the
| bones. There are many things wrong with it that make it
| different from other common acids like sulfuric acid.
|
| Penetration: Unlike other acids that cause immediate pain
| and visible burns on the skin, hydrofluoric acid can
| penetrate the skin quickly without causing immediate pain
| or visible damage.
|
| Skin damage: Once absorbed through the skin, hydrofluoric
| acid continues to cause deep tissue damage, which may not
| be immediately apparent.
|
| Bone and joint damage: Hydrofluoric acid has a high
| affinity for calcium and can cause decalcification of the
| bones, leading to severe bone damage and potentially fatal
| electrolyte imbalances. It can also cause joint damage and
| pain.
|
| Systemic effects: If left untreated, hydrofluoric acid
| poisoning can lead to systemic effects such as hypocalcemia
| (low blood calcium levels), hypomagnesemia (low blood
| magnesium levels), and hyperkalemia (high blood potassium
| levels), which can cause cardiac arrhythmias and death.
|
| Treatment: Immediate treatment is crucial for hydrofluoric
| acid exposure. Calcium gluconate gel is typically applied
| to the affected area to neutralize the acid and prevent
| further damage. In severe cases, intravenous calcium and
| magnesium may be necessary to treat systemic effects.
|
| The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
| has established a permissible exposure limit (PEL) for
| hydrofluoric acid at 3 ppm (parts per million) as an 8-hour
| time-weighted average (TWA) concentration. The National
| Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
| recommends an even lower exposure limit of 3 ppm as a
| ceiling limit, not to be exceeded at any time.
| fy20 wrote:
| Thanks ChatGPT!
| greenavocado wrote:
| Please, this is not ChatGPT! (If nothing else the math is
| actually correct, something LLMs suck at)
|
| The average volume of water in one square kilometer of a
| river basin can vary greatly depending on the specific
| characteristics of the basin, such as its topography,
| geology, climate, and land use. Factors like
| precipitation, evaporation, infiltration, and water
| abstraction also play significant roles in determining
| the water volume within a basin.
|
| However, to provide a rough estimate, we can use the
| concept of average runoff depth. Runoff depth is the
| average depth of water that would cover the entire basin
| if all the water flowing through it in a given time
| period were evenly distributed across the basin's
| surface.
|
| In the United States, the average annual runoff depth
| varies widely, ranging from less than 0.1 inches (2.54
| mm) in some arid regions to more than 40 inches (1,016
| mm) in some humid regions. For this example, let's assume
| an average annual runoff depth of 20 inches (508 mm).
|
| To calculate the volume of water in one square kilometer
| of the basin, we can use the following formula:
|
| Volume = Area x Average runoff depth
|
| Given:
|
| Area of the basin = 1 square kilometer = 1,000,000 square
| meters Average annual runoff depth = 20 inches = 0.508
| meters Volume = 1,000,000 m2 x 0.508 m = 508,000 m3
|
| This means that, on average, one square kilometer of this
| hypothetical river basin would contain about 508,000
| cubic meters of water annually. However, it's essential
| to note that this is a highly simplified estimation, and
| actual water volumes can vary significantly depending on
| the specific characteristics of the basin and the time
| period considered.
|
| The North Toe River has an approximate basin area of
| 2968.7 km2
|
| 2968.7 km2 x (508000 m3/km2) / m3 = 1,508,099,600 m3 of
| water
|
| Given:
|
| Target concentration = 3 ppm = 3 mg/L
|
| Volume of water = 1,508,099,600 m3
|
| Concentration of concentrated HF = 48% w/w (weight by
| weight) = 480,000 mg/L (assuming the density of 48% HF is
| approximately 1 kg/L)
|
| Step 1: Convert the volume of water from cubic meters to
| liters. Volume of water = 1,508,099,600 m3 =
| 1,508,099,600,000 L
|
| Step 2: Calculate the mass of HF needed to reach the
| target concentration. Mass of HF = Target concentration x
| Volume of water Mass of HF = 3 mg/L x 1,508,099,600,000 L
| = 4,524,299 kg
|
| Step 3: Calculate the volume of concentrated HF needed.
| Volume of HF = Mass of HF / Concentration of HF Volume of
| HF = 4,524,299 kg / (480,000 mg/L / 1,000,000 mg/kg) =
| 9,425,623 L
|
| Therefore, approximately 9,425,623 liters of 48%
| concentrated hydrofluoric acid would need to be added to
| the entire river basic to reach a concentration of 3
| parts per million.
|
| If the affected area is 1 km out of the 118.4 km length
| of the river, this would require in a spill of approx.
| 79,600 liters of 48% concentrated hydrofluoric acid to
| reach a concentration of 3 parts per million.
|
| _What I don 't understand at all is how this is possibly
| an accident. It is hard to release such quantities of
| hydrofluoric acid by accident._
| TylerE wrote:
| US environmental laws and industrial safety enforcement
| are basically a farce.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Not true, there is a significant improvement relative to
| 1969, the end of an era where a river in Ohio caught on
| fire 11 times between 1869 and 1969.
| TylerE wrote:
| That doesn't contradict what I said. If you get a 65 on
| the test instead of a 30, your score significantly
| improved, but you still flunked.
| greenavocado wrote:
| You can't quantify the improvement in these terms because
| you yourself don't have a way to measure it.
|
| Edit because I can't reply:
|
| What is abundantly clear is the main areas with severe
| problems with water pollution today are Africa and the
| Indian Subcontinent: https://ourworldindata.org/clean-
| water
| TylerE wrote:
| It's pretty clear from the number of ongoing current
| catastrophes (PFAS, more recently BPA, cities with lead
| pipes) that what we're doing now isn't enough. Can we
| start from that as a point of agreement?
| 4ad wrote:
| This is pure propaganda, one of the many reasons HF is
| really bad is because _it doesn 't hurt at all_, at least
| in the beginning.
|
| Environmental disasters are really bad by themselves,
| adding propaganda on top only weakens the cause and makes
| people in the know not care.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Sounds like they should have the resources to make sure
| they're not polluting.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Take this line of reasoning to an extreme and you have The
| Ganges River.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I'm still disappointed Wikipedia removed the addendum to
| the article about "Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man"
| comparing the Mississippi River's water quality at the time
| to the Ganges quantitatively.
| TylerE wrote:
| It's North Carolina. That's not even a Tuesday. We routinely
| have spills that dump _millions of a gallons_ of concentrated
| hog shit directly into our rivers. Most of those rivers are
| also downstream of one of the major producers of PFAS.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I recently toured an MRI factory. They used 20 tons of quartz per
| week to mix in with the epoxy resin that encases the gradient
| coils. Its thermal stability makes it desirable.
| perihelions wrote:
| That makes sense: so the alignment doesn't shift as the
| gradient coils operate and heat up, right? Those aren't the
| superconducting coils, they have Ohmic heating.
| lostlogin wrote:
| No, not superconducting.
|
| Body and gradient coils I believe. They get a lot of current
| through them. 3x 200 amps at 2000 volts if I recall
| correctly. They have cooling pipes too.
|
| If a cable wiggles loose it's a big deal with that much power
| in use, they start to smoke. Running that that current is a
| large force on any connections.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Fun fact, the quartz is used to make the big crucibles where the
| silicon wafers crystallize by starting from a seed in the center
| which is slowly drawn upward. My grandmother was a quartz
| salesperson for GE for decades (they sourced their quartz from
| this same company) and they make the crucibles. My grandma lived
| in a place with a small yard and her garden was planted in these
| very modern-looking quartz crucibles that were destined for
| chipmakers but had some tiny flaw on the inner surface so they
| couldn't be sold.
| harikb wrote:
| I was very confused initially because you talked about 'seed'
| as well as a garden. Do you mean something like this? [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Yes, exactly.
| jonah wrote:
| That's neat!
|
| My uncle gave me a bunch of large electrical insulators from
| the old high-tension transmission lines heading West from
| Hoover Dam. They make great yard ornaments.
| samatman wrote:
| Quartz singing bowls have historically been sourced from flawed
| crucibles. I don't know if that's still true exclusively or
| even primarily. Just always thought it was cool.
| Animats wrote:
| There's a competitor in Drag, Norway.[1]
|
| There was a startup in Australia that was going to mine ultra-
| high quality quartz.[2] No site updates since 2021.
|
| [1] https://www.thequartzcorp.com/location/drag
|
| [2] https://ultrahpq.com
| exabrial wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if this if this is the same geological
| source of quartz that makes a bunch of the gulf coast beaches
| really white.
| jacknews wrote:
| SCR - SIBELCO on euronext in case anyone wants to the follow the
| pump.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| Local mines also produce the materials used to make nuclear
| weapons, which on more than one occasion has led to anti-
| proliferation protests in Asheville.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| If this is true, they should charge more.
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