Comment on China Just Turned Off U.S. Supplies Of Minerals Critical For Defense & Cleantech
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 week agoIt’s good to have production capacity ready to go, underutilizing input streams. Things like steel can do this very well, things like state of the art microchips? not as much.
It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible, if we could buy the bulk ores and just have our own mines ready to start producing if the ore shipments ever stop, that’s the ideal circumstance - but going at it like that is a little transparent.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Iron ore is available everywhere. Steel production is more of a bottle neck, even if emergency development of a new mine might take 1 year (but increased production from existing mines is much quicker). In US, more iron ore is exported than used in domestic steel production.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 week ago
I mean, if people will pay us for gases extracted from the atmosphere, I’m all for that. And iron ore doesn’t seem to be nearly as concerning as things like copper, cobalt, lithium (though I bet the “lithosphere” has much more available lithium in it than we currently know.)