New Technology Produces Cheaper Tantalum and Titanium 139
Billy the Mountain writes "A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold. According to this piece in The Economist: A tantalising prospect, the key is a technique similar to smelting aluminum with a new twist: The metallic oxides are not melted as with aluminum but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte. This technology is known as the FFC Cambridge Process. Other metals include Neodymium, Tungsten, and Vanadium."
bringing new technology online (Score:2)
"A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold."
Online... Will it make the tantalum and titanium down-loadable also?
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haha. "Bring it online" is a common management-speak from the "quaint" old days. :)
This is a post that I would have expected from slashdot back in her good old days. I hope there still are some here that are in the know, and chime in with their thoughts.
Thumbs up, lamer.
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Aluminum is mostly made by Rio , and uses subsidized electricity from anyone who wants jobs and a smelter, and heaps of sodium hydroxide - a salt that also 'costs' to produce. Anyone who discovers a way of saving energy inputs will be well rewarded.
Magnesium. like aluminum is basically solidified electricity, so the process sounds good - until the other energy is factored in.
BTW Alum smelters have stirrers that add pressure to the equation - chemists have done their homework, and using aluminum to make alum
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"A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold."
Online... Will it make the tantalum and titanium down-loadable also?
Yeah, you'll just have to download it to your 3D printer, and you print out as much as you want. Tantalum wants to be free.
Slowpoke (Score:1, Flamebait)
The FFC Cambridge process was developed by George Z. Chen, Derek J. Fray and Tom W. Farthing between 1996 and 1997 in the University of Cambridge.
I realize /. is a little behind the times, but 17 years behind?
Are we going to have stories about Wright brother's magical flying machines next?
Re:Slowpoke (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is certainly prone to error, so I'm not going to defend this specific case, but it's not uncommon for a 17 year lapse between having a process progressing from an academic discovery to an industrial implementation. Using your example, it was a decade between the first flight and the first scheduled commercial flight (heck, even four years to the first passenger).
Re:Slowpoke (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are we going to have stories about Wright brother's magical flying machines next?
You never know [wikipedia.org]
the problem with titanium (Score:2)
is not the manufacturing. it's "working" it.
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Informative)
I work with titanium. Buying 500 kg this week. It's not that bad. I'd use more of it if it were cheaper.
You want to talk hard to work with, try gamma titanium aluminide. Blah! And I'm sure there is far worse stuff. Plutonium?
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Funny)
You want to talk hard to work with, try gamma titanium aluminide.
I think gamma titanium aluminide is managing my project.
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Funny)
Is your manager brittle, expensive, and prone to making weird noises?
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Flatulence, while occasionally aromatic perhaps, does not count as weird.
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If only I had mod points... That was great!
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Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Funny)
Face it, there's probably enough keywords there to have triggered alarm bells at the NSA anyway.
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Depends on what isotope really. If it were Plutonium 238, there wouldn't be much to be afraid of. It would produce 122 kilowatts of heat, so storage would be an issue. You'd want to store it in lots of separate containers in a large, cooled space, or even outdoors. You would also need radiation shielding, but only a tiny amount of it. It's also toxic if consumed, but so are lots of things.
So, not necessarily all that scary.
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Of course, it's diluted by several billion billion times as much other non-threatening material.
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Are you making fan blades for a jet engine? Why is gamma titanium aluminide hard to work with?
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Interesting)
I've only used it for prototypes, but nothing aerospace. Which means either very expensive custom tooling for die casting or machining. And it won't quite machine like metal. Grinding works, but that's slow for complex shapes.
It's not impossible to work with, just weird. Vibrates and makes the strangest sounds while machining.
Now that I think about it, boralyn was worse. Tore up machine tools and gummed up grinding tools. You can cast, forge, and weld the stuff. But none of the parts I work with are amenable to those processes.
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm not sure how interesting it'd be as a video. I don't do much machining in my shop. There are some amazing people and shops out there and I value their expertise. All I could do is show my lab in the US and ramble about different projects.
Still, I get to play with some fun stuff. I use exotic stuff because I design medical devices. Little tiny mechanisms with tight performance requirements. 95% of the time exotic materials don't help, but it's worth testing them. I've researched gold for one appli
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1) how you generate the requirements for a medical device, the brainstorming period before you start actually working on materials 2) How you test a material for a particular application, why cobalt alloys might be used for a particular implant rather than titanium or surgical stainless steel. 3) Your projects a
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With titanium? Try again, but stop to think a bit this time.
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Meh, from what I hear plutonium isn't all that hard to work. It machines well enough (the bomb industry can machine it into interesting revolved ellipsoids to fit into MIRV warheads). It is usually found and used as a pure metal. Pure metals tend to be pretty soft and ductile - it is only once you start alloying things that they gain their mechanically useful properties. The main downside is that you can't work it in the open air: the chips will burn, a
Re:the problem with titanium (Score:4, Informative)
You can safely hold a lump of the stuff (scientific samples) with your bare hands. It's warm, but otherwise completely safe because it only emits alpha or beta particles (I forget which). You wouldn't want to eat it or breathe in dust from a machining process, however.
Titanium, the metal of the 21th century (Score:3, Informative)
Most people, even on slashdot, don’t realize the huge potential of titanium.
It's not only a better metal, it's perfect. In fact, if you mixed together aluminum and stainless steel together and tap the result with a magic wand to remove all its flaw (Resistance to corrosion, acid, rust etc.), you'll get titanium.
Its light as aluminum, strong as steel, completely resistant to corrosion and quite abundant (given, it's not as abundant as iron and aluminum, but it's not that far either. You'll be surprised
Re:Titanium, the metal of the 21th century (Score:5, Interesting)
Titanium is a very good material, but it isn't perfect. The fatigue capability is relatively low for its strength, especially in cast form. Strength at temperature is good, but far short of nickel based superalloys that are similar in cost. Low ductility and elastic modulus means it isn't easily formable and makes machining more difficult. It has limited resistance to wear due to lower hardenability. Oh, and it can catch on fire under the right conditions.
Although, for many aerospace applications there's no substitute at almost any cost. It allows the weight of parts, that would otherwise need to be made of steel or nickel alloys, to be cut nearly in half (and that adds up quickly since it applies to a large portion of the main structural components in things like jet engines).
If the price does drop drastically, I'd expect to start seeing Ti show up a lot more in areas like the automotive industry, where weight is important but it's use had been limited by cost.
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I'm an aerospace engineer, so I have had a bit of experience with various metal alloys, but I'm no metallurgist.
I know there are several other Ti alloys available, but there are only three that seem to be widely used. CP Ti (unalloyed, grades 1-4), Ti 6-4 and Ti 6-2-4-2
There are some significant differences between these in strength and temperature capability, but nothing like the range of steel and nickel alloys that are available. Steel can range from barely better than aluminum in tensile strength to o
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Although, for many aerospace applications there's no substitute at almost any cost. It allows the weight of parts, that would otherwise need to be made of steel or nickel alloys, to be cut nearly in half (and that adds up quickly since it applies to a large portion of the main structural components in things like jet engines).
If the price does drop drastically, I'd expect to start seeing Ti show up a lot more in areas like the automotive industry, where weight is important but it's use had been limited by cost.
My understanding was that the primary drivers for using titanium in aerospace were heat and fatigue characteristics, and that otherwise aluminium was almost always a better choice, if the design was capable of using it well. (Similar specific modulus of elasticity, so if you have the space you can use large-diameter tubing to get lower weight for the same performance.) As such, I'd expect to see automotive titanium used only in areas where volume or fatigue is a big concern. Are there other areas in whic
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True, if the temps. are low and there are no geometry constraints, aluminum would probably be the best choice regardless of cost. Although, I was thinking mostly about engine components. Cast Ti blocks would be stronger and reduce the need for cooling compared to aluminum and are still much lighter than steel/cast iron.
As far as other areas go, there are already quite a few bicycle parts that are already available in Ti which would likely become much more popular if the price dropped significantly.
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I actually use titanium alloy because of its great fatigue properties. I've cycled Ti64 at 50% of yield for 10^10 cycles without failure.
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I guess that really depends what you're comparing it to. Ti fatigue strength can be superior to almost all aluminums and even many standard stainless steels, but there are some nickel alloys that have an endurance limit at or above yield.
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Cool. I never knew that about nickel alloys. Nickel is avoided in surgical products due to nickel alleriges. So as soon as I see nickel in the name, I move on.
Still, I'm intrigued. I've seen titanium alloys do the same and thought it was a fluke. The stuff still broke, but after cycling a couple million times at 110% of yield.
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Meh.
First: It's 66% heavier than aluminum, and about half the strength of hardened steel.
Don't get me wrong, titanium is pretty good stuff, but it still has trade offs beyond price. After all, it's only about 2-5 more expensive than stainless (depending on type of stainless form factor, etc) so if it was so clearly better, why is it so specialty?
As a comparison:
Aluminum:
Vastly easier machine, vastly easier to cast (much lower melting point).
In terms of strength/weight, aluminum is actually quite competitiv
Razor blades (Score:3)
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Much like women!
But I wouldn't get them in 500kg packages.
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Oh there is worse stuff. Have fun machining tungsten carbide, I'll be waiting here with a laser in case you decide your regular stuff isn't 'cut' out for the job!
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We don't machine tungsten carbide in our shop, but we do make some pure tungsten parts
We buy it in 2' long rods from China. We have to buy a years worth at a time, lead time is so bad it is the only feasible way we have found to get any kind of price discount.
Cheaper titanium would be useful for us too.
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the problem with titanium is that its currently incredibly expensive to refine it from its ore, if the costs of refining it the problems of "working" it aren't major hurdles compared to its . Its already used extensively in Aircraft frames were its weight to strength ratio make it economic despite its high cost. if the cost of refining it dropped by the amounts claimed we would see HUGE increases in the use of titanium.
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Owner "hopes", "thinks" and "hopes" again (Score:2)
Perhaps with enough investment, his dreams could become true?
Protip: businesses that have a ready market crying out for the products that they claim to be able to make cheaply don't need to be spending time talking to the press.
Tritanium (Score:3)
new technology that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold.
Noooooo, my huge cache of veldspar will become worthless! Oh titanium, not tritanium..... never mind.
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"Reduce the prices ten-fold"?? (Score:5, Informative)
Reduce the prices ten-fold
Really? I think you're trying to say "reduce by 90%".
Or you could have just quoted TFA : "for less than a tenth of such powderâ(TM)s current price". But that's The Economist, their editors actually care about both the English language and making sense.
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Re:"Reduce the prices ten-fold"?? (Score:4, Informative)
Tenfold = ten times as much. Not one tenth. If you mean "one tenth" SAY "one tenth".
"reduce tenfold" literally means take away ten times. i.e. 1-10 = -9 Since that's nonsense, we can only guess what they actually mean
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/tenfold [oxforddictionaries.com]
tenfold adjective. ten times as great or as numerous:
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As a scientist, I hear '-fold' used to refer to both increases and decreases at equal frequencies. 'Reduce by ten-fold' is a normal usage, despite your interpretation of this one dictionary's entry on the word.
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The key word is 'reduce'. If he said: "increased the price tenfold" (to mean costing 10x as much), you wouldn't complain then.
Because you can increase tenfold. Not reduce.He actually means reduce by 90%. Or reduce to one tenth. "Tenfold" is nonsense.
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Increase 10 fold = Times by 10
Decrease 10 fold = Divide by 10
Even if it isn't commonly used (which I think it is anyway), I'd WANT to put that into common parlance just because it is so logical, concise and reasonable. Don't forget English is still an evolving language.
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Reduce ten-fold means "divide by ten". Remember that division is actually repeated subtraction. If you have 13 of something, what do you have to subtract from it 10 times to get 0? The answer is 1.3. That's also, not by coincidence, the answer to "what do you get when you divide 13 by 10?" and "what do you get when you have 13 and reduce it tenfold?"
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Hello tragedy,
Your rationale suggests that "reduce ten-fold" would always be equivalent to zero. It seems that "reduce nine-fold" would be equivalent to "divide by ten", right?
BTW, I have no problem with your conclusion, just with the rationale.
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Nevermind: increase or decrease ten-fold means nine times. Got it. Duh.
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Finally titanium that's cheaper than dirt.
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Take the price, say p. Then reduce it by 10p. Reduce means subtract, which leaves us with -9p. Do you see why it doesn't make sense?
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On the other hand, if someone says "the price increased tenfold" would they mean the price is now 10p or 11p? Taking the words literally, as you have for reducing tenfold, it would be 11p, but I would guess that most people intend 10p -- not that it's right, but people tend to use such language in a very sloppy manner.
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To "reduce it by 10p" is not the same thing as "reduce it 10p". One is a way of describing subtraction and the other is a way of describing division.
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Hmmm. Replying to my own post here. I have to admit, on re-reading, it's too ambiguous for me to say that. I'm going to have to say that I'm flat out wrong on the post I'm replying to. For the "reduce tenfold" matter, however, you're definitely wrong. The "fold" part of "tenfold" implies repetition ten times, which, in this context, means division.
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Reduce the prices ten-fold
Really? I think you're trying to say "reduce by 90%".
Hmm. I guess this is why english isn't a programming language.
Poster fails to read TFA - as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, do the people posting these stories ever read TFA?
"The metallic oxides are not *melted as with aluminum* but blended in powder form with a molten salt that serves as a medium and electrolyte."
Wrong! The Hall-Héroult process (main Al production method) is exactly that! Dissolving alumina in molten cryolite to allow electrolysis without heating to alumina's melting point.
So actually the apparent amazing breakthrough turns out to be, "oh hey, they found a new solvent to dissolve things in".
Accurate facts please guys, leave the sensationalising by omission to the tabloids.
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When all said and done (Score:3, Funny)
"A small UK company is bringing new technology online that could reduce the prices of tantalum and titanium ten-fold.
When all said and done, who doesn't like cheap tan and tits
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Me.
I find Katie Price/Jordan and others who go for that particular look quite unattractive.
Don't worry buyers (Score:2)
If they can scale up this process.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It could literally change the world.
Titanium--which is actually common in the soil--is an amazingly strong metal that is also quite corrosion resistant and can withstand very temperatures. Even with the expensive production processes used up till now, titanium was favored by the aerospace industry because of its strength and heat resistance and for making propeller blades for ship screws because they withstood the corrosive effects of seawater.
With a vastly cheaper production process, it could make it possible to substantially lighten the weight of automobiles--which has the benefit of either lower petrol/diesel fuel consumption or needing a smaller battery pack (in the case of electric cars). And it means high-speed trains can be vastly lighter while still meeting safety standards for passenger train cars, which means smaller and more efficient traction motors on electric multiple unit (EMU) passenger trains.
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No mod points, but you deserve them.
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Recycling and peak production (Score:2)
This development may lower things for a while and raise demand for a while until more expensive sources are found to replace the cheap ones that ran out quickly (due to increased demand.) This will be the peak for that resource and it'll not ever likely do that again. It may not even peak that much with the delay in production rate increase and the commodity traitors (misspelling intentional.)
The real problem long term is recycling. We don't recycle most materials and won't until they become rare enough o
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it could make it possible to substantially lighten the weight of automobiles
Possible but steel is actually better than titanium when it comes to the metallurgical property of toughness and fatigue resistance, and its cheap.
Maybe some elements could be titanium-ized, but the body will probably be steel for the near future.
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I think you may be a bit optomistic. Titanium may actually be common, but how common are high quality ores? This benefits one step of the production process, but I really doubt that it would drop the price by a factor of 10. Perhaps 5, perhaps less. Unless I'm misunderstanding, and this allows one to use rather low quality ores as the basis of extraction.
FWIW, the space shuttle was originally going to be made from Titanium, but it got switched to that ceramic tile system largely because the sources of T
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Tractor trailers getting blown over aren't because of weight but because of the huge cross sectional area they present from the side. As far as vehicles getting blown all over the road it also is more a function of cross sectional area than weight. I have driven a Geo Metro and that got blown around less than my Jeep Cherokee and things like that can be mitigated by better under vehicle aerodynamics.
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There has already been a subtle shift in design aesthetic for commuter vehicles toward designs that aerodynamically hug the road. Reducing the weight of vehicles would indeed make them more likely to get blown around, so I would expect that swept surface aesthetic to continue in force, so that wind blown over the vehicle shoves it down onto the road.
This would be especially important for luxury sports cars, since their market demographic is "rich thill seeker who likes to drive really fast." The same issue
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Titanium will become obsolete. (Score:2)
Tantalum won't be much effected (Score:5, Interesting)
At CURRENT extraction rates there's less than a 50 year supply so making the processing cheaper will just make it run out faster.It's possible some new sources will be found, but no apparent ones are on the horizon.
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Looking on or over the horizon in to outer space is much more difficult than looking up. Don't you know we'll be getting our tantalum from freakin' asteroids [slashdot.org]?
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You assume the current, commercially viable, supply is all that is available. A newer, cheaper refining process can make sources that currently aren't commercially viable become viable.
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Cheaper refining processes don't automatically deal well with lower grade ores. Some do, most don't.
One promissing approach is bioextraction. This is currently in use, I believe, in gold mining. Whether something analogous could be developed for other minerals is the question...but certainly doesn't seem implausible.
Warning: Bioextraction is not a particularly environmentally friendly process. IIUC the extraction of gold involves soaking mine tailings in a pit of acidic water. It's also not fast. The
reducing the cost of refined titanium by 90% (Score:2)
Would be almost the start of a titanium revolution in industry. It would reduce the cost of everything from boat propellers to aircraft to bicycles.
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I wouldnt count on it :)
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What? You think that the manufacturers wont pass on the savings to their customers? I can't believe that would happen. I mean, they would have to be incredibly greedy.
Manufacturers would certainly avoid passing savings on to their customers as long as they can get away with it, but it would never last. The first manufacturer to reduce price by 10% (and still earn an exorbitant profit) to gain even a sliver of market share would trigger a price war that permanently brings the cost in line with reality.
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One or two large manufacturers keeping their price artificially high will allow all the smaller manufacturers to maintain their prices only slightly lower. That's pretty much always the way the world works outside of RonPaulLand. Coca Cola and Pepsi have no intention of lowering the price on their flavored carbonic acid, and because they control 90 percent o
Cheaper Unobtanium (Score:2)
The world needs cheaper unobtanium, the big blue Smurfs put up a good fight.
Combats steel prices (Score:3)
Steel has gotten very expensive as China industrializes, which hurts many industries. Titanium is highly plentiful and if it could compete with steel on even a fraction of its markets then it would help reduce the world's demand. Fun unintended consequences may include a resurgence in building construction.
Is steel expensive in China though? (Score:2)
Now I realize retail and wholesale are two different worlds but here in Taiwan retail I just bought 36 meters of 1" diameter 18 guage steel square tubing for about US$72.00. I thought that was quite cheap actually. 36 meters, that's over a hundred feet so about seventy cents a linear foot.
I was just driving down south over the Chinese New Year and I saw nothing but truck after truck carrying steel rolls.
I suspect steel has gotten expensive in some countries and not so much in others. Copper is the same way
Re:someone in Russia just went nuts (Score:5, Funny)
one might even say he threw a tantalum
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I'm assuming that you're new in the countryside, so:
Do remember that corn is nortorious for destroying the soil, and alternate it with, say, beans. My grandfather used a four field system, where one field was cotton, on field was alfalfa, one field vegetables (usually boysenberries, but it varied), and one field was pasture. (Alfalfa counts as a bean. So does vetch. But if you don't have a grazing animal it gets more difficult. Beans would work, though, but that's a lot of beans. For his cotton you co
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Nice. That sounds closer to the bookstores, etc. than I am.
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