> 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.
As far as I know there are several other companies selling quartz as pure as Spruce Pine, they’re just more expensive because Spruce Pine has an old and well developed industry. This is an opportunity for other vendors to invest in their processes enough to take the market while Quartz Corp, et al are rebuilding.
Another POV is that every shortage you and I, as laypeople, have ever experienced, has been the result of something strictly political, like trade agreements, unstable governments, poor worker rights, poor property rights, etc. When the reason for a shortage appears to be economic, like "just more expensive," it is the result of political economic decisions like tariffs, or political business decisions like certifications.
You know a lot more about quartz manufacturing: do you sincerely think that someone in China couldn't figure out how to make the quartz (or whatever) cheaply?
It’s quartz, the most common mineral on this planet. Literally any mainland country on this planet has enough to start their own industry.
China has been trying as part of its latest (14th) five year plan but there’s a reason so much of the semiconductor supply chain is in Japan, Korea, US, and Europe: labor costs aren’t the driving force. It’s energy and capital equipment and intellectual property and decades of expertise with quality control. Everything else is secondary.
According to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
The Black Hills are a relatively obscure source of the semiconductor-grade quartz we use in everything from chips to nuclear warheads. Protests in Asheville about non-proliferation have popped up about it for years. I expect there will be measurable effects from this incident, and hopefully, some of those will be in local policy to prevent it from happening again. Asheville was my second home, and it's sad to see WNC suffer like this.
Correction: the quartz here is used for making crucibles, not the silicon for chips themselves. The latter is far more pure than this quartz could be, and is produced by a multistage purification process (involving distillation of trichlorosilane) starting with relatively impure metallurgical silicon. And that is produced by reducing quartz with carbon in an arc furnace, so unless that carbon is extremely pure (and it's not) you're introducing impurities anyway.
If it is mostly for the crucibles, wouldn’t you expect a fairly modest impact to the market? Presumably everyone that needs one already has them in usage. Or do the crucibles wear out at a quick pace?
Any other material for the crucible except quartz would introduce impurities from whatever substance it is made.
Quartz is already silicon dioxide. It could introduce only silicon atoms, which do not matter at all, or oxygen atoms, which also do not matter much.
The only alternatives to quartz would be other silicon compounds that have a melting point higher than pure silicon, e.g. silicon nitride, but all of them are more expensive than quartz.
In the past, besides the crucibles for holding melted silicon, quartz was widely used for the walls of the ovens (typically having the form of a quartz tube) where silicon wafers were heated for various operations, e.g. for diffusion, and also for the wafer carriers on which the wafers were placed while inside the ovens (a.k.a. "boats").
These uses expose the material to lower temperatures than in the crucibles, because the wafers are solid, not melted.
Quartz is still used for these purposes, but in many cases it has been replaced with polycrystalline pure silicon, which can resist to these lower temperatures and it also cannot introduce any impurities. In comparison with quartz, polysilicon has the advantages of matched thermal expansion with the silicon wafers and of higher mechanical strength at high temperatures.
"Semiconductor devices, the foundation of the semiconductor industry, are manufactured by creating a fine electronic circuit on a silicon wafer made of single-crystal silicon.
Single-crystal silicon is made from high-purity polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon) and is grown by filling a quartz crucible with the silicon before heating and melting it in the extracting machine.
A high-purity quartz crucible is the optimal container to ensure the purity of molten silicon when manufacturing single-crystal silicon."
I knew it was absolutely crucial for semiconductors, I just saw "non-proliferation" and thought there was some obscure usage for silicon specifically for nukes. Mere semiconductor use is an odd thing for anti-nuke protestors to single out. computers are essentially a commodity at this point, why not protest copper mines because copper wire is used in circuits?
Ah, I missed the 'plutonium' at the end of your comment. Not from the area, but I suspect the protests there are more due to the HEU production site 20 miles away although I know the original plutonium manufacturing method resulted in a small 'button' of plutonium that was left in the bottom of a high-temp crucible after the final reduction step, so maybe this facility was instrumental in those crucibles?
Nuclear warheads have electronics with very sensitive timing requirements. It is these components, and not the processing of fissile material, that the quartz is needed for.
About four years ago my parents got a cabin up in the mountains right along the NC-TN border, and we’ve been up there almost every summer since. Just last month we went tubing on the North Toe, so I know exactly where that CSX rail line is. Just wish I had the free time to go and help volunteer!
You wouldn’t believe how fragile some of our supply chains are, and how many single points of failure we have.
For a while a decade and a bit ago, there was only one operational, legal tantalum smelter on the planet - the others had been destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami or shut down over their use of conflict minerals and slavery.
I think there are now three - all on the ring of fire.
Then you’ve got stuff like cobalt, which we get at the whim of the DRC, a notoriously stable and functional state.
And of course, gallium, graphite, and rare earths, which pretty much all come from China. They could, at will, bring the global electronics supply chain to its knees.
I guess risk is everywhere, really, in our fragile systems.
I vaguely remember a story about an accidental single point of failure. If I recall correctly, during the 1970s or 1980 there was a critical part of the wafer production process (slicing the crystal into wafers, perhaps?) which relied on highly specialized tooling.
As it turns out, a bunch of manufacturers had independently discovered that by far the best source of them was a small company in Japan - unbeknownst to them essentially just one guy and his workshop. So everyone sourced it from him. Which was fine, until he took a holiday for the first time in a decade... Suddenly both original-source and second-source factories for some important chips were unavailable!
I'd love to know if anyone has more details, because I haven't had any luck with finding any reference to it. It's a story I read probably a decade ago, so who knows how many details I got wrong.
One advantage of these types of things is how easy they are to stockpile. Aside from the nominal storage costs, none of these things degrade over time:
Stockpiles and other forms of resiliency (such as redundant facilities) cost a lot of money because by definition you cannot run them at nominal capacity or it's just a ton of expensive stuff that sits around.
Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of accounting for resiliency as it optimizes to cut such "dead costs".
Toyota, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of JIT manufacturing, famously began stockpiling microchips after the Fukushima disaster disrupted their supply chains. It might not make sense to stockpile raw materials, but stockpiling things with comparatively low storage costs w.r.t. the item cost sometimes makes sense from a capitalist perspective. This assumes the company runs with a long-term perspective in mind, which often isn't the case in western companies that are publicly traded or owned/operated by investment firms. In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.
What a lot of people (and companies) missed is that Toyota doesn't optimize till there's no slack left, and instead properly run Kanban let's you establish a capacity and slack "reserve" in the system.
Some people seem to run companies towards absolutely no slack at all, and are baffled by the idea of keeping some.
> In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.
That's because governments are run by the same braindead efficiency-first mindset these days.
It used to be easy to campaign on resiliency back when the USSR still existed - no matter what, all NATO countries had really large armies, months worth of stockpiles of everything from arms and munitions over medical supplies to food. Education was heavily invested in because the countries needed well educated adults to compete with the external threat. Companies kept stockpiles and had detailed disaster recovery plans and drills, not just for natural disasters but also for "how the fuck do we keep production running when the Red Army is marching towards the border" and "how the fuck do we transition from building cars and motorcycles to tanks and fighter planes when the Great War breaks out".
But once the USSR fell and the "end of history" was announced [1], all of that resiliency went down the drain - it was expensive after all and neoliberalism / "starve the beast" ideologues demanded that the "inefficiency" be cut to lower the tax burden on the corporations and the rich... and here we are, our education systems in shambles, companies got screwed left and right when covid hit and supply chains broke, and our societies in shambles as well as the people didn't have much reserves left after decades of wage stagnation and companies didn't either so they laid people off.
You'll find similar levels of ecologic devastation in the GDR as you will find in the Silicon Valley - the greatest agglomeration of Superfund sites in the US, originating from all the silicon production before a lot of it moved to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Also, for fucks sake, look at the Western German Ruhrpott and the Ewigkeitslasten there. Or the open pit brown-coal mines - both West and East Germany have these, and they're a menace no matter where. All resource extraction is incredibly devastating, no matter if under communism, capitalism or anything in-between.
In the 80s, the GDR had unfiltered or less well filtered coal power stations, more widespread use of toxic chemicals such as PCBs, less safe nuclear power stations, and the standard car type had a two-stroke engine. Did you see the blackened house facades in the East in the early 1990s? It really was worse than West Germany. Doesn't mean that everything was fine in West Germany.
Open-pit mining holes and other permanent problems from mining like the need to pump out water to prevent flooding aren't really preventable except by not mining. It's mostly HOW things were done in the East that was worse. They had fewer spare resources to do things "nicely" and the state controlled both industry and the media (even the population via Stasi), so problems could be swept under the rug more easily.
IDK, Berkshire Hathaway sure has a big stockpile of cash, and they're emblematic of capitalism. The cash in this model would be considered a "dead cost", as it's "wasted" by not being immediately invested in equities.
I agree with you, in general, that the short-term incentives of our system encourage "optimization" away from stockpiling inputs, and that this is a worrying problem.
But I find it instructive to focus on and give credit to the long-term thinkers who buck those trends – and who have historically profited and persisted by doing so, by the way.
I would be more worried about Northern Virginia. I doubt the world at large would notice much problem if SFBA dropped off the network, but they sure would if the same happened to NoVA.
AFAIK till quite recently, if not still, us-east-1 was SPOF for various components of AWS. Your already deployed things would continue to work, but APIs (and most importantly, Console) wouldn't, IIRC.
A typical multinational social media operator has datacenters around the globe. The question is rather whether these can really function independently should the central ones go offline.
Ed Conway's book Material World has more about silicon.
An even more obscure mine in Spain is used for the quartz to make the crucibles that hold molten silicon. For some reason its melting point is just far enough above that of silicon metal to make the process feasible.
The source for the claim that a 2008 fire impacted the market merely repeats the claim without any further detail. What happened? Does anyone remember being unable to find a core 2 quad Q9400 because of the shortage?
A limited fire will only temporarily impact supply since companies have reserves of the stuff. Anyways, the market was much smaller back then, and everyone's attention in 2008/09 was rather on the crisis...
Possibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
We can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it.
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method is the actual big crystal growing process, to which this quartz is just the input. Effectively we repeatedly make a crystal with the impurities moved to the end, then saw off the end and discard it, then re-melt the crystal to make it even purer.
It’s not the size that’s hard but the 99.9999% purity. The quartz from these mines is crushed, sorted for impurities, and fused/annealed into larger crystals before they’re ready for the semiconductor industry.
The single crystals of silicon that are made are cylinders with a diameter of 0.3 meter and a height probably of around 2 meter or even more.
The crucible must be bigger than that. The crucible is made from fused quartz glass. So the mine does not need to have big quartz crystals. They must be only pure. The mined crystals are melted together and processed like any glass, except that processing quartz glass is difficult, due to the very high melting point and the high viscosity of the melted quartz.
The melting of the pure quartz requires itself a crucible made from materials that resist to even higher temperatures, e.g. a crucible of molybdenum or even a crucible of iridium, for the lowest contamination with impurities.
We can, using big autoclaves and a process called hydrothermal synthesis. It's how we make single crystals that get sliced and diced into quartz oscillators. But the process takes a long time, think mm/day, and isn't really appropriate for making big things like crucibles.
"In conclusion – existing wafer inventory provides a buffer as mining operations restart, major companies are already using synthetic methods to produce semiconductor-grade quartz crucibles, and there are other sources of HPQ. Spruce Pine FUD is exaggerated."
Here's a compiled list of local charities, nonprofits, and volunteer opportunities to support the Hurricane Helene relief efforts: https://kharity.com/hurricane-helene/
I take u/MeteorMarc to be saying with the current rush to build and power data centres and the additional greenhouses gases released thereby, any slowdown in this will be helpful in our attempts to address climate change.
In this case you could almost look at it as climate change solving itself!
"The world's semiconductor industry hinges on a single quartz factory in North Carolina"
(130 points 6 months ago | 97 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39818248
@hn_throwaway_99 wrote in that thread:
> 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.
We'll see if they're right...
As far as I know there are several other companies selling quartz as pure as Spruce Pine, they’re just more expensive because Spruce Pine has an old and well developed industry. This is an opportunity for other vendors to invest in their processes enough to take the market while Quartz Corp, et al are rebuilding.
Hereus Conamic and WACKER Chemie come to mind
Another POV is that every shortage you and I, as laypeople, have ever experienced, has been the result of something strictly political, like trade agreements, unstable governments, poor worker rights, poor property rights, etc. When the reason for a shortage appears to be economic, like "just more expensive," it is the result of political economic decisions like tariffs, or political business decisions like certifications.
You know a lot more about quartz manufacturing: do you sincerely think that someone in China couldn't figure out how to make the quartz (or whatever) cheaply?
It’s quartz, the most common mineral on this planet. Literally any mainland country on this planet has enough to start their own industry.
China has been trying as part of its latest (14th) five year plan but there’s a reason so much of the semiconductor supply chain is in Japan, Korea, US, and Europe: labor costs aren’t the driving force. It’s energy and capital equipment and intellectual property and decades of expertise with quality control. Everything else is secondary.
How do you really know where a Japanese or Korean vendor gets their stuff? “Trust me bro?”
Analysis of trace elements and impurities, isotopic composition, and cathodoluminescence.
"How do you really know where a US vendor gets their stuff?"
I don’t, the hard truth is that most things that are reaching the scale where I can buy them on Amazon and Costco are cheaply made overseas.
According to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”
The Black Hills are a relatively obscure source of the semiconductor-grade quartz we use in everything from chips to nuclear warheads. Protests in Asheville about non-proliferation have popped up about it for years. I expect there will be measurable effects from this incident, and hopefully, some of those will be in local policy to prevent it from happening again. Asheville was my second home, and it's sad to see WNC suffer like this.
Correction: the quartz here is used for making crucibles, not the silicon for chips themselves. The latter is far more pure than this quartz could be, and is produced by a multistage purification process (involving distillation of trichlorosilane) starting with relatively impure metallurgical silicon. And that is produced by reducing quartz with carbon in an arc furnace, so unless that carbon is extremely pure (and it's not) you're introducing impurities anyway.
If it is mostly for the crucibles, wouldn’t you expect a fairly modest impact to the market? Presumably everyone that needs one already has them in usage. Or do the crucibles wear out at a quick pace?
The article says the crucibles can often only be used once.
What is the crucible used for and why must it be made of quartz? Is it for refining or shaping the plutonium?
The crucible is used for holding melted silicon.
Any other material for the crucible except quartz would introduce impurities from whatever substance it is made.
Quartz is already silicon dioxide. It could introduce only silicon atoms, which do not matter at all, or oxygen atoms, which also do not matter much.
The only alternatives to quartz would be other silicon compounds that have a melting point higher than pure silicon, e.g. silicon nitride, but all of them are more expensive than quartz.
In the past, besides the crucibles for holding melted silicon, quartz was widely used for the walls of the ovens (typically having the form of a quartz tube) where silicon wafers were heated for various operations, e.g. for diffusion, and also for the wafer carriers on which the wafers were placed while inside the ovens (a.k.a. "boats").
These uses expose the material to lower temperatures than in the crucibles, because the wafers are solid, not melted.
Quartz is still used for these purposes, but in many cases it has been replaced with polycrystalline pure silicon, which can resist to these lower temperatures and it also cannot introduce any impurities. In comparison with quartz, polysilicon has the advantages of matched thermal expansion with the silicon wafers and of higher mechanical strength at high temperatures.
They melt the high-purity silicon in high-purity quartz crucibles to ensure a single crystal in the resulting product;
https://www.mmtc.co.jp/en/products/quartz.html
"Semiconductor devices, the foundation of the semiconductor industry, are manufactured by creating a fine electronic circuit on a silicon wafer made of single-crystal silicon.
Single-crystal silicon is made from high-purity polycrystalline silicon (polysilicon) and is grown by filling a quartz crucible with the silicon before heating and melting it in the extracting machine.
A high-purity quartz crucible is the optimal container to ensure the purity of molten silicon when manufacturing single-crystal silicon."
I knew it was absolutely crucial for semiconductors, I just saw "non-proliferation" and thought there was some obscure usage for silicon specifically for nukes. Mere semiconductor use is an odd thing for anti-nuke protestors to single out. computers are essentially a commodity at this point, why not protest copper mines because copper wire is used in circuits?
Ah, I missed the 'plutonium' at the end of your comment. Not from the area, but I suspect the protests there are more due to the HEU production site 20 miles away although I know the original plutonium manufacturing method resulted in a small 'button' of plutonium that was left in the bottom of a high-temp crucible after the final reduction step, so maybe this facility was instrumental in those crucibles?
Pluntonium? In semiconductor manufacturing? Tell me more please.
> The Black Hills are a relatively obscure source of the semiconductor-grade quartz we use in everything from chips to nuclear warheads.
Maybe read the thread you're replying to?
Nuclear warheads have electronics with very sensitive timing requirements. It is these components, and not the processing of fissile material, that the quartz is needed for.
I see. If a component is in a nuclear warhead, it must be made of plutonium. The things one learns!
I just saw that it was the target of "non-proliferation protestors" so I thought it had some arcane use as a component of a warhead.
They have a use, but my ability to talk about it is limited.
Curious what the specific connection between ultra-pure quartz and nuclear weapons is.
Timing devices for ultra synchronized implosion.
I’m just a little south of there and watching what has happened is gut wrenching.
About four years ago my parents got a cabin up in the mountains right along the NC-TN border, and we’ve been up there almost every summer since. Just last month we went tubing on the North Toe, so I know exactly where that CSX rail line is. Just wish I had the free time to go and help volunteer!
You wouldn’t believe how fragile some of our supply chains are, and how many single points of failure we have.
For a while a decade and a bit ago, there was only one operational, legal tantalum smelter on the planet - the others had been destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami or shut down over their use of conflict minerals and slavery.
I think there are now three - all on the ring of fire.
Then you’ve got stuff like cobalt, which we get at the whim of the DRC, a notoriously stable and functional state.
And of course, gallium, graphite, and rare earths, which pretty much all come from China. They could, at will, bring the global electronics supply chain to its knees.
I guess risk is everywhere, really, in our fragile systems.
I vaguely remember a story about an accidental single point of failure. If I recall correctly, during the 1970s or 1980 there was a critical part of the wafer production process (slicing the crystal into wafers, perhaps?) which relied on highly specialized tooling.
As it turns out, a bunch of manufacturers had independently discovered that by far the best source of them was a small company in Japan - unbeknownst to them essentially just one guy and his workshop. So everyone sourced it from him. Which was fine, until he took a holiday for the first time in a decade... Suddenly both original-source and second-source factories for some important chips were unavailable!
I'd love to know if anyone has more details, because I haven't had any luck with finding any reference to it. It's a story I read probably a decade ago, so who knows how many details I got wrong.
Sounds like DISCO to me, although details differ.
One advantage of these types of things is how easy they are to stockpile. Aside from the nominal storage costs, none of these things degrade over time:
https://www.dla.mil/Strategic-Materials/
Stockpiles and other forms of resiliency (such as redundant facilities) cost a lot of money because by definition you cannot run them at nominal capacity or it's just a ton of expensive stuff that sits around.
Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of accounting for resiliency as it optimizes to cut such "dead costs".
I don’t think that’s a fundamental inability; we just choose not to due to fashion in business thought.
But there’s nothing fundamentally that prevents pricing in risk of shortages to shareholders and appropriately stockpiling to mitigate that risk.
> But there’s nothing fundamentally that prevents pricing in risk of shortages to shareholders and appropriately stockpiling to mitigate that risk.
There is. Shareholders are just as likely to fall into the short-term gains trap.
Toyota, who is widely recognized as the pioneer of JIT manufacturing, famously began stockpiling microchips after the Fukushima disaster disrupted their supply chains. It might not make sense to stockpile raw materials, but stockpiling things with comparatively low storage costs w.r.t. the item cost sometimes makes sense from a capitalist perspective. This assumes the company runs with a long-term perspective in mind, which often isn't the case in western companies that are publicly traded or owned/operated by investment firms. In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.
What a lot of people (and companies) missed is that Toyota doesn't optimize till there's no slack left, and instead properly run Kanban let's you establish a capacity and slack "reserve" in the system.
Some people seem to run companies towards absolutely no slack at all, and are baffled by the idea of keeping some.
> In fairness, governments also frequently fail at accounting for resiliency, even when that's their explicit goal, so perhaps the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system.
That's because governments are run by the same braindead efficiency-first mindset these days.
It used to be easy to campaign on resiliency back when the USSR still existed - no matter what, all NATO countries had really large armies, months worth of stockpiles of everything from arms and munitions over medical supplies to food. Education was heavily invested in because the countries needed well educated adults to compete with the external threat. Companies kept stockpiles and had detailed disaster recovery plans and drills, not just for natural disasters but also for "how the fuck do we keep production running when the Red Army is marching towards the border" and "how the fuck do we transition from building cars and motorcycles to tanks and fighter planes when the Great War breaks out".
But once the USSR fell and the "end of history" was announced [1], all of that resiliency went down the drain - it was expensive after all and neoliberalism / "starve the beast" ideologues demanded that the "inefficiency" be cut to lower the tax burden on the corporations and the rich... and here we are, our education systems in shambles, companies got screwed left and right when covid hit and supply chains broke, and our societies in shambles as well as the people didn't have much reserves left after decades of wage stagnation and companies didn't either so they laid people off.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
> the incapability to account for resiliency goes beyond the economic system
Reminds me of how bad pollution was in the GDR (communist Germany). You think capitalism is bad for the environment? Communism was worse.
You'll find similar levels of ecologic devastation in the GDR as you will find in the Silicon Valley - the greatest agglomeration of Superfund sites in the US, originating from all the silicon production before a lot of it moved to Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Also, for fucks sake, look at the Western German Ruhrpott and the Ewigkeitslasten there. Or the open pit brown-coal mines - both West and East Germany have these, and they're a menace no matter where. All resource extraction is incredibly devastating, no matter if under communism, capitalism or anything in-between.
In the 80s, the GDR had unfiltered or less well filtered coal power stations, more widespread use of toxic chemicals such as PCBs, less safe nuclear power stations, and the standard car type had a two-stroke engine. Did you see the blackened house facades in the East in the early 1990s? It really was worse than West Germany. Doesn't mean that everything was fine in West Germany.
Open-pit mining holes and other permanent problems from mining like the need to pump out water to prevent flooding aren't really preventable except by not mining. It's mostly HOW things were done in the East that was worse. They had fewer spare resources to do things "nicely" and the state controlled both industry and the media (even the population via Stasi), so problems could be swept under the rug more easily.
IDK, Berkshire Hathaway sure has a big stockpile of cash, and they're emblematic of capitalism. The cash in this model would be considered a "dead cost", as it's "wasted" by not being immediately invested in equities.
I agree with you, in general, that the short-term incentives of our system encourage "optimization" away from stockpiling inputs, and that this is a worrying problem.
But I find it instructive to focus on and give credit to the long-term thinkers who buck those trends – and who have historically profited and persisted by doing so, by the way.
Half of the world's neon was coming from Ukraine, a quarter each from Odessa and Mariupol.
This is also critical for semiconductor manufacturing.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
Everyone seems to forget that Silicon Valley and its datacenters are in an earthquake zone.
I would be more worried about Northern Virginia. I doubt the world at large would notice much problem if SFBA dropped off the network, but they sure would if the same happened to NoVA.
AFAIK till quite recently, if not still, us-east-1 was SPOF for various components of AWS. Your already deployed things would continue to work, but APIs (and most importantly, Console) wouldn't, IIRC.
A typical multinational social media operator has datacenters around the globe. The question is rather whether these can really function independently should the central ones go offline.
Ed Conway's book Material World has more about silicon.
An even more obscure mine in Spain is used for the quartz to make the crucibles that hold molten silicon. For some reason its melting point is just far enough above that of silicon metal to make the process feasible.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Material-World-Materials-Modern-Civil...
The source for the claim that a 2008 fire impacted the market merely repeats the claim without any further detail. What happened? Does anyone remember being unable to find a core 2 quad Q9400 because of the shortage?
A limited fire will only temporarily impact supply since companies have reserves of the stuff. Anyways, the market was much smaller back then, and everyone's attention in 2008/09 was rather on the crisis...
Possibly a dumb question, but why can't we grow synthetic quartz in the same way we grow silicon wafers? Or can we and it's just not cost effective vs mining?
We can but synthetic quartz faces the same problem as hydrocarbon fuels: we can make synthetic natural gas if we use enough energy, or we could exploit the geological processes that created it over millions of years and extract it.
High-purity quartz from areas like Spruce Pine typically forms in pegmatites, where slow cooling of magma allows large, defect-free crystals to form. Hydrothermal fluids permeate these rocks while they’re cooling, effectively leaching out impurities. If the geochemistry is just right, over millions of years, this process repeats several times creating very high purity quartz deposits that are very difficult to replicate in laboratory conditions.
Any idea how big these quartz crystals needs to be?
Single crystal sapphires ~250kg are grown in production, so it should be possible with reasonable effort to do similar for quartz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyropoulos_method
---
Seems like it already is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz#Synthetic_and_artificia...
No mention there of purity though.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method is the actual big crystal growing process, to which this quartz is just the input. Effectively we repeatedly make a crystal with the impurities moved to the end, then saw off the end and discard it, then re-melt the crystal to make it even purer.
It’s not the size that’s hard but the 99.9999% purity. The quartz from these mines is crushed, sorted for impurities, and fused/annealed into larger crystals before they’re ready for the semiconductor industry.
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The single crystals of silicon that are made are cylinders with a diameter of 0.3 meter and a height probably of around 2 meter or even more.
The crucible must be bigger than that. The crucible is made from fused quartz glass. So the mine does not need to have big quartz crystals. They must be only pure. The mined crystals are melted together and processed like any glass, except that processing quartz glass is difficult, due to the very high melting point and the high viscosity of the melted quartz.
The melting of the pure quartz requires itself a crucible made from materials that resist to even higher temperatures, e.g. a crucible of molybdenum or even a crucible of iridium, for the lowest contamination with impurities.
Well that's not nearly as neat looking as I naively expected a large sapphire to look like.
I suppose the usual gem color arises from the impurities?
They seem pretty ugly if they're not cut. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-INytU_pdkg
Can nanoassembly produce quartz more efficiently?
/? nanoassembly of quartz https://www.google.com/search?q=nanoassembly%20of%20quartz mentions hydrothermal synthesis,
Which other natural processes affect the formation of quartz and gold?
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41437036#41442489 :
> "Gold nugget formation from earthquake-induced piezoelectricity in quartz" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01514-1 [...]
> Are there phononic excitations from earthquake-induced piezoelectric and pyroelectric effects?
> Do (surface) plasmon polaritons SPhP affect the interactions between quartz and gold, given heat and vibration as from an earthquake?
> "Extreme light confinement and control in low-symmetry phonon-polaritonic crystals" like quartz https://arxiv.org/html/2312.06805v2
We can, using big autoclaves and a process called hydrothermal synthesis. It's how we make single crystals that get sliced and diced into quartz oscillators. But the process takes a long time, think mm/day, and isn't really appropriate for making big things like crucibles.
If you want to invest in a company with a nearby undeveloped quartz deposit, there's someone looking for money.[1] Of course, it might be a scam.
[1] https://gusherknob.com/project-goals/
A large typhoon is also ~1 day away from hitting Taiwan, but I think TSMC is well prepared for it.
The research analyst at SemiAnalysis put out a Twitter thread yesterday explaining why he thinks the impact to the global supply chain is overstated here: https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/1840871017746698617
"In conclusion – existing wafer inventory provides a buffer as mining operations restart, major companies are already using synthetic methods to produce semiconductor-grade quartz crucibles, and there are other sources of HPQ. Spruce Pine FUD is exaggerated."
Here's a compiled list of local charities, nonprofits, and volunteer opportunities to support the Hurricane Helene relief efforts: https://kharity.com/hurricane-helene/
Interesting related article I found just browsing some news and trying to understand the impacts;
"The Semiconductor Apocalypse No One Would See Coming"
https://www.viksnewsletter.com/p/the-semiconductor-apocalyps...
If Google is telling me the truth, 300mm silicon wafers are about $75.
Would the loss of the North Carolina quartz bring a major increase?
It is said that alternative (higher cost) substitutes are available.
So, from the viewpoint of climate change this flood is positive feedback.
Negative
How so?
I take u/MeteorMarc to be saying with the current rush to build and power data centres and the additional greenhouses gases released thereby, any slowdown in this will be helpful in our attempts to address climate change.
In this case you could almost look at it as climate change solving itself!