The "Free world reserve" - excluding China, North Korea and the USSR
(age of book and what is going on today ??) - is estimated at about 295,
000 tons of metal content Tungsten. The other three countries have
about 4 times as much as the ROW.

At this same time, the us was producing 4,000 tons from domestic mines.

This is from my "Mineral Facts and Problems" 1965 Edition.
US Dept of the Interior. Bureau of Mines Bulletin 630.
(I have not found a newer version. I bout this new when it was printed.)

Martin

On 3/15/2012 3:08 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:59:44 -0500,
wrote:

On 3/15/2012 10:47 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
O
I wonder how many Tungsten deposits there are in the continental US that
might be exploited if the price goes up enough.

Hundreds. The US has quite a bit of tungsten. Canada does, too, in the
Yukon, and theirs is high-quality ore.

We don't mine it for the same reason we don't mine molybdenum:
environmental issues. And they're heavy issues, involving questions
like, "How soon do you want to die to get some more tungsten?"

Rising prices *should* encourage solutions to the environmental
problems. Then markets will prevail.

Meantime, let's suck up all we can from China. I'd rather they turn
out thousands of crippled mutants than us. d8-)

Whoop! I got tungsten mixed up with molybdenum mining, and toxicity.
Actually, I mentally got them reversed.

Moly is highly toxic. Tungsten and its compounds are not. Most of the
environmentl problems with tungsten involve leeching of soluble
compounds from tailing ponds and the like.


There is more to i that just that, though.

China drove the price down to the point of putting competitors out of
business.

If the price rises to the point where it is economically viable to start
mining again, they could dump the market and run everybody off again.

I doubt it. They would run smack into WTO regulations, which Europe
and Japan now seem willing to charge and enforce, along with us.

As long as China is supplying tungsten (and rare earths) without
prejudice against foreign buyers, it doesn't hurt us that they
dominate the market. But now it is charged that they are squeezing the
foreign market in order to gain an advantage with the products
manufactured from those metals.

That has put them in the sights of all of their customers. We'll see
action from the WTO soon, and we'll find out whether enforcement of
their regulations has any effect -- or any teeth.

In any case, we aren't going to have to beg them for tungsten. We have
quite a bit of it, and we will have it when we need it.