Slashdot Mirror
The Congo Tantalum Rush
Logic Bomb writes: "The New York Times Magazine takes a look at the mining of a muddy substance called coltan. Once refined, it becomes tantalum, the crucial ingredient in capacitors. To put it simply, the modern high-tech world depends on this stuff. And while most of us have images of squeaky-clean chip factories and such -- in marked contrast to sleazy textile sweatshops -- it turns out that this industry has a dark side that takes a major toll on human lives. Definitely worth a read."
And here are the articles from NPR and the United Nations Security Council Report (PDF)
These were also months ago....
Evidently it wasn't interesting then as my submission got rejected.... the heck with Karma...
Hate to say it, but technically speaking, the article and the post are both way off. Tantalum isn't "the crucial ingredient in capacitors", and the electronics industry doesn't "depend on this stuff" at all. Most caps are made with ceramic materials (e.g. clays) or paper soaked in an electrolytic solution, but there are many other dielectrics available, like polypropylene, mica, etc., each with their own favourable characteristics.
The nice thing about tantalums is that they are very small for the amount of capacitance they have - hence their popularity in PDAs and celphones. But they're expensive, and polarised - you have to plug them in the right way, or they literally blow up. They also can't tolerate much overvoltage.
For the things that tantalums are most often used for (power-supply filtering), a kind of capacitor called multilayer ceramic actually works better. These are made mostly from nickel powder, and they're much cheaper and tougher. They're also non-polarised, which can reduce assembly costs, and they don't depend on hard-to-get tantalum powder.
Last year there was a shortage of tantalum powder, which made tantalum caps really hard to get. Now word is getting out that the new breed of multilayer ceramic chip caps can do just as well, people aren't using tantalums nearly as much as they were. I think this is the real reason for the tantalum ore crash.
"... Today, the valley is home to more EPA Superfund sites (29) than any other county in the nation, with the most notorious of those sites -- from a leaking tank at a Fairchild Semiconductor fabrication plant -- poisoning a well that served the south San Jose neighborhood of Los Paseos. A subsequent study by the state's Department of Health Services found 2.5 to three times the expected rate of miscarriages and birth defects among pregnant women exposed to the contaminated drinking water, leading to a lawsuit and multimillion-dollar settlement in 1986 with over 250 claimants...."
Full two-part story at Salon, 7/30/01 and 7/31/01:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/30/almad en1/index.html
Well first of all, if you have the flu, the measles and the chicken pox all at once, you don't say "Hey, who cares if I catch pneumonia!" Just because you have lots of problems doesn't mean that it;s okay to have more.
If anything, the establishment of mining and factories will add stability to the region, since the companies want to protect their money and investment.
Secondly, did you actually read the article? There are no companies. There are no factories. And those mines are holes in the ground dug by people (roughly organized into "camps"). It's still anarchy, not good financial planning.
Besides, you only get to mine your natural resources once, then they're gone. The article says that the money from coltan mining is not going into infrastructure like schools and roads. So what happens when the coltan is gone? Evenyone's actually worse off than they started, because there's no more money to be made by mining, and you've gained nothing that can increase the country's wealth in the long run (like schools!) in return.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the Congo been mined for diamonds for 100+ years now? Has it done any good? Why do you think the coltan situation will be different?
You'be been living in a dream world if you ever thought that the computer industry was squeaky clean. Silicon Valley has the highest density of EPA Superfund sites in the USA. Check out this lovely map of Silicon Valley pollution. If you live in this neighborhood, you'll get cancer for sure. Computer production has never been clean. In fact, it's nearly as dirty as the military. The manufacturers have simply been able to put on a "clean" face for the world.
The Industry Standard had an article on this a couple months ago: http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,26784,00 .html.