tantalum

We use these in all consumer electronics - Tantalum is a major component of capacitors and resistors.

Nobody else seems to feel the need to rename Platinum Platinium, or Molybdenum Molybdenium, or Tantalum Tantalium.

A material with twice the melting point of tantalum halfnium carbide sounds like an ablative heat shield to me.

If you look closely, you can see that he added his tantalum capacitors to the already-present small ceramic decoupling capacitors.

The result was that a tantalum capacitor was installed backwards on a 12V supply rail.

Two of the eleven tantalum smelters on the planet have been audited.

Anyway I though civilisation was going to collapse because Tantalum was only available in a couple of war torn African countries?

It's long been standard practice with tantalum filter capacitors to feed them through an inductor or at least a resistor to prevent inrush current failures.

I'd recommend skipping tantalum caps altogether and filling that size/freq tier with larger ceramic multilayers since you're not designing for cost.

Since 2001 – long before most other companies began to take an interest – it has tried to remove illegally mined tantalum from its supply chain.

Cable modems and other RF equipment operate at very high frequencies by definition, and tantalum & electrolytic capacitors with long leads are ineffective at these high frequencies.

Dad worked for a firm that made tantalum capacitors, and one day the truck carrying the raw metal was hit by a train on the way to their plant.

Tantalum capacitors are only "trivial to substitute" in some applications; as someone who works in electronic hardware, I can assure you that it is often impossible to use any other part, and achieve the same performance.

Intel's disclaimer says at the end of the page: "products do not contain conflict minerals (tin, tantalum, tungsten and/or gold) that directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or adjoining countries."

And even if it is the primary deciding factor, there's no way of going "The reason I didn't go with you was because of your packaging, rather than your price/functionality/willingness-to-spy/tantalum use." and the result would at-best get confused for something else.

See, it's a very known problem with real humans - from boycotting Coca Cola for slaughtering people in poor countries, to tantalum capacitor production being based on even worse slaughter of men, women and children in poor countries, to the whole environmental fuckup we enjoy today - "voting with your wallet" doesn't work.

You know, we really ought to rename Tantalum->Lead, and Lead->Tantalum.

That's a very brave statement, given that there's currently no clear data for Tin/Tungsten/Tantalum/Gold smelters' ore origins.

Tantalum capacitors are polarized, and they fail in a spectacular way when reverse-biased.