I have no idea if this is a bug or if I have a mod that is breaking it or if I'm just incompetent, but for whatever reason, I can't use dust. I may be doing something wrong, but my order of operations goes iron ore into clumps into dust, and then when the dust arrives at the furnaces, it doesn't get used no matter what. From what I have gathered by looking at images, I think I'm supposed to be able to smelt dust into plates, but my furnaces won't take dust. I tried disabling any mods that affected furnaces but no luck, so I'm not sure what's going on. I believe I have all the necessary technologies. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi mate.
If what you say it's true, and you don't have mods that change the furnace prototype or its recipes, probably your furnaces are trying to smelt coal into coke instead of the dusts into the plates. This is a known issue, since you can't set the furnace recipe as the other machines.
At the moment I'm not able to find it, but smo has made a mod to allow you to do this like you were using assembling machines.
Hope this is enough to fix your problem.
_77