You’d think smelting plants would tend to be in the same area so carting material from one to another wouldn’t be too hard (or they could build a new smelter on site).
Digging it up and then shipping the “better” ore has its own cost which would seem to suggest the lower grade material can be worthwhile.
How is it you do not sell the pile of crud you do nothing with at any price? Is it better to get nothing and pay to pile it up on your own land better? Sell that cheap…beat out the 80% guys. Any money is better than no money.
Obviously they don’t think so and I am willing to bet they have thought of that and more. I just do not get it.
simple logic proves them wrong.
Count the sources of fire
A private house, made of wood, has one kitchen with one stove and one family with maybe one cigarette lighter. A fire will ruin one family’s life.
A tall building obviously has more potential sources of fire, and more damage to more people.
The risk is much higher.
Risk is a many faced thing. What is there a risk of? What are the numbers? Fire of any form? Fire that destroys the entire building? Fire of a ferocity that can be contained by suppression systems installed in the building?
There very well could be a reasonably calculated risk that the chance of a fire that destroys the entire building - one that can outrun the suppression system - is no worse than for other building types. It isn’t as if a fire in a steel and concrete building is always trivial in comparison.
What I wonder is how the building can be repaired after a “small” fire?
Steel and concrete will be largely unaffected by a local fire (say in one apartment). But, even if fire suppression works in the wooden building what happens after a local fire? Can support columns be replaced?
Concrete doesn’t fare well in an intense fire. It spalls, and cracks, and may chemically degrade. Eventually cracks can leave the rebar exposed to thermal degradation. A fire may leave a concrete building with significant reduction of structural integrity. Even if it doesn’t fail, it may be impossible to remediate economically. That is a bad fire, but concrete isn’t the intrinsically fireproof material people suppose. The problem in building fires is going to initially be the non-structural material burning, and that is true no matter what the building is made of. If the fire gets intense enough, all structures are in danger.
A wooden structure can be much easier to repair. Wood can be cut away and remaining structures bonded with new wood in a manner that concrete can’t so easily be repaired. I suspect the main structure of these buildings is large scale laminated beams. These should be intrinsically repairable - their basic structure is laminations of wood glued together.
I’m not claiming that wood is immediately superior, but I do feel that properly designed and with appropriate suppression systems, it is likely no more dangerous than any other structure.
I suspect that, for a common mineral like iron, the cost of the ore is minuscule compared to the cost of the processing. At some point, the processing becomes enough more expensive that it’s not worth it even if the raw material is free.
You might still be able to sell the stuff cheaply as something other than an iron ore (like, say, as a filler material in concrete). I’m a little surprised if they haven’t managed to find any market for it at all. But not using it for ore makes sense.
Related to that excellent point is that in many industries we have very highly refined efficient methods for doing task X, and a complete supply chain for machines to do X, and the machines to make the machines to do X. And all the business arrangements appurtenant thereunto.
It takes comparatively large amounts of capital and a pioneering spirit to do some task Y that produces the same product (e.g. raw iron) via different means.
Said another way, industrial practice and hence economic history is extremely path dependent. Which has been one of the obstacles to EV production and EV adoption. We are so good at ICEs and gasoline, which is to say so low a marginal delivered cost of both, that EVs, despite being a better, and potentially simpler invention have a hard time competing in the marketplace since they are so much farther back on the expensive part of the learning curve, and so much farther back on the expensive part of the infrastructure deployment curve as well.
Note that the only reason Nucor and the “mini-mills” famously managed to get a foothold on the US steel business and go on to dominate it was the legacy labor costs of the legacy unionized steelmakers. Had the legacies been free to gut their labor costs, their advantage in already paid for infrastructure and mature processes would have ensured that Nucor would have been a bug on US Steel’s windshield.
For where the steel industry is today, taking that crappier ore may be (probably is) a lot of up front costs leading to a higher marginal cost of production. No economic gain there, even if it would be closer to a no-waste closed-loop system.
Economics / Finance exhaust their waste “stuff” into the physical world. And they do much better with a low-back pressure exhaust system. Even if that does trash the planet & other living things.
Nickel slag is recycled for it’s iron content. At least it is in China. The high volume of slag resulting from nickel smelting would contain 3-8 times more iron than nickel. There is the possibility that refining the slag is still not practical for particular smelting processes.
I know this thread is old but there is an interesting video on YouTube which discusses this. Interestingly, different sands can be used in construction. As long as the sand shape is taken into account it seems doable.
Flooding in North Carolina has imperiled the operations of mines that produce the world’s purest quartz sand — an irreplaceable ingredient for manufacturing components at the heart of smartphones and other electronic devices.
“We wuz gonna fit you with cement overshoes, but then we realized that mixin’ up the cement would use up some of that precious sand. So we’re just gonna handcuff you to a radiator instead.”
I read an article about six years ago about this and it claimed that China has used as much concrete since 1990 as the rest of the world since forever.
I tried finding that, but no luck. However I did find a good - albeit lengthy - article on BBC for the peruse of anyone who wants to pound sand:
China alone has likely used more sand this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th Century.
That statistic is a lot less surprising than you might think. China is a very big country, which has grown its economy rapidly, and 1990 was 34 years ago.
Economic growth compounds. At 5% a year, an economy doubles in less than twenty years. Typically, doubling your economy doubles your resource consumption, until your economy matures enough to depend on services. Which means that (once your economy has been growing for a while) over the next twenty years, you will use more of everything than you used in all of history to date. (Draw a simple graph if that surprises you).
Think about what that means for the use of sand over the next few years.
China has three times the population of the United States. How could it NOT be using more sand in a decade now than the US did in all of last century? How long do you think it now takes the US to use as much sand as it did in the last century? A LOT less than a hundred years.
If you apply this thinking to fossil fuel use, it is easy to see how the climate is going pear shaped so fast.
Similarly, don’t expect plastic pollution to get better any time soon.
