[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: [Green Party Black Caucus] What's really behind the war in the Congo?

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I think Alex and Diane are really onto something here.

The "rare mineral" is coltan, which is the ore we extract tantalum from.
Tantalum is used in wet capacitors where you need more speed and density
than you can get from cheaper aluminum wet (electrolytic) capacitors.

Wet capacitors, tantalum or aluminum, are a "weak link" component in
electronic systems.  They wear out.  They leak and dry up and fail.
There's a grey market in mainland Chinese counterfeits of high quality
Taiwanese and Japanese electrolytic caps, and when those get into computer
motherboards they fail a lot.  Apple among others has had huge recalls.

When I was at 3Com's Desktop Ethernet division in the early '90s,
we stopped using wet capacitors.  Our problem with them was the supply was
erratic and the price was unstable, as well as the bad reliability.
We used large "solid" multilayer ceramic caps instead.  These had recently
been developed for camcorders, where tantalums aren't quite fast enough
and fail too often.

Recently I am seeing computer motherboards at Fry's advertising
"solid capacitors" as a feature.  Computer hobbyists are onto wet
capacitors as a weak link.  This summer KPFA's "Guns and Butter"
show had someone on talking about coltan.  I called in and mentioned
that there were alternatives to tantalum and it might be wise to
focus on that in campaigning against the stuff.  The "expert" said
I didn't know what I was talking about and they hung up on me.
It *is* possible to build electronic stuff without tantalum.
The biggest-selling line of PC add-in cards 1991-1996 was tantalum-free.
They once thought it was impossible to build electronic stuff without lead.
Now, thanks to the European Union and the end of CRTs, it's standard.
And with white LEDs replacing fluorescent bulbs, mercury-free
electronic stuff is coming.

These days a campaign has to fit on a bumper sticker or it won't move.
People know about "blood diamonds" because movie stars have campaigned
against them.  The diamond brokers got into the act and talk about
"conflict diamonds" instead.  Maybe it's time to start talking about
blood capacitors.


Cameron in San Jose