The world's main source of high-purity quartz needed for semiconductors could be disrupted
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Another brewing disaster caused by the recent hurricane: Hurricane Helene destroys area of critical mineral mined for global semiconductor production | interest.co.nz[^]
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Well crap, there goes my weekend plans.
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Another brewing disaster caused by the recent hurricane: Hurricane Helene destroys area of critical mineral mined for global semiconductor production | interest.co.nz[^]
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Synthetic quartz can also be "grown."
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Another brewing disaster caused by the recent hurricane: Hurricane Helene destroys area of critical mineral mined for global semiconductor production | interest.co.nz[^]
Ok, I have had my coffee, so you can all come out now!
Silicon dioxide doesn't really qualify as a rare earth element :-) - it is the second most abundant one in the Earth's continental crust. There are, of course, various qualities of pureness in naturally occurring quartz. I guess this mine provides some of the purest raw material for further processing. Yet, I have never before heard anything getting even close to "Spruce Pine has pretty much a total worldwide monopoly on HPQ", as the article phrases it. Quartz is mined "all over" - and purified from less pure raw materials. Maybe the purification costs are somewhat higher in other places, but the electronics industry will not come to an abrupt halt from mine being shut down temporarily or permanently. In Norwegian, we have a way of speech, being "world renowned within Norway", indicating that those associated with some phenomenon grossly overstate their importance on a world scale. I am quite sure that a shutdown of the Spruce Pine mines may be catastrophic for the Spruce Pine village, far more than for the semiconductor industry.
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