• fidodo@lemmy.world
      39·
      10 months ago

      The rare stone thing would be better for nuclear power. Find lots of rare stone, put it together in a huge pile, they get warm and cause mysterious diseases.

        • fidodo@lemmy.world
          11·
          10 months ago

          Isn’t uranium that’s pure enough naturally to cause a reaction on its own really rare? I’m referring to the Chicago Pile experiment. It was so simple that it could have been theoretically built thousands of years ago which is crazy to think about.

          • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
            2·
            10 months ago

            Not really. Every single shovel full of dirt has trace amounts. It’s just gathering enough into a pile. Like I said, nature did it on earth, before humans existed. It’s weapons grade uranium that’s really rare

            • fidodo@lemmy.world
              12·
              10 months ago

              You can’t get a reaction when it’s that trace though. It needs to be unusually pure to be able to stack a bunch of raw ore and get a reaction.

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
      301·
      10 months ago

      Silicon is just the base material. The whole process involves a whole bunch of other chemicals, and some of those are made of much rarer stuff than silicon.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
      17·
      10 months ago

      Sure, Silicon works as a cheap base. Boron, phosphorus, arsenic and antimony are also used in the process, though. Other elements are also finding use in the process.

      There is also a minor error in the middle about the ‘sigils’. When scribing process is happening, the other elements are embedded into or deposited onto the substrate between ‘scribings’.

      • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
        54·
        10 months ago

        Gold also isn’t all that rare. It’s value is so high because of jewelry marketing, not rarity.

        • TheChurn@kbin.social
          13·
          10 months ago

          Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.

          Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.

          There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
          13·
          10 months ago

          You may be confusing with diamonds. Gold is, and in fact, any element heavier than iron are pretty rare because they cannot be created by stars alone according to current models, they need more extreme and rare astrophysics phenomenons like supernova and black holes.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
      5·
      11 months ago

      Technically correct but just cause there are minerals in the ground doesn’t mean they can be extracted.

      Maybe i am wrong but i keep hearing about silicon being harder to come, i suppose op was specifically speaking about the silicon usable for computing.

      • kameecoding@lemmy.worldEnglish
        81·
        10 months ago

        silicon being harder to come

        interesting silicone usually makes it easier for me to come

      • TheChurn@kbin.social
        3·
        10 months ago

        The form of silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing, specific formations of sand, is becoming harder to source from the environment. Silicon the element is incredibly abundant - the vast majority of all rocks on Earth are silicates - so there isn’t a risk that we run out of silicon itself any time soon.

        What may happen, in several decades, is an increase in price due to the need to process more abundant rocks to obtain pure silicon.

  • Sprokes@jlai.lu
    2·
    10 months ago

    Out of the loop? I know that China is no longer allowing export of rare metals, did the situation escalate?