Serious question:
Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?
replies(8):
That said, I honestly am unsure. It also is a requisite that it must be in the water in sufficient but low amounts
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...
This is what it was called back in the day. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02478259
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lithium-in-drinking-water-linked-...
ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.
For the HN audience, of course this is 'technically incorrect'.
The article was written for the (larger) general public.
I am also glad they didn't squeeze in a word salad of LLMs and quantum technology and instead stuck to 'it's just standard ML'.
An RF machine-learning model was developed to predict lithium concentrations in Smackover Formation brines throughout southern Arkansas. The model was developed by (i) assigning explanatory variables to brine samples collected at wells, (ii) tuning the RF model to make predictions at wells and assess model performance, (iii) mapping spatially continuous predictions of lithium concentrations across the Reynolds oolite unit of the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, and (iv) inspecting the model for explanatory variable importance and influence. Initial model tuning used the tidymodels framework (52) in R (53) to test XGBoost, K-nearest neighbors, and RF algorithms; RF models consistently had higher accuracy and lower bias, so they were used to train the final model and predict lithium.
Explanatory variables used to tune the RF model included geologic, geochemical, and temperature information for Jurassic and Cretaceous units. The geologic framework of the model domain is expected to influence brine chemistry both spatially and with depth. Explanatory variables used to train the RF model must be mapped across the model domain to create spatially continuous predictions of lithium. Thus, spatially continuous subsurface geologic information is key, although these digital resources are often difficult to acquire.
Interesting to me that RF performed better the XGBoost, would have expected at least a similar outcome if tuned correctly.
Infant mortality rate? 3rd most deadly for babies.
Poverty rate? 7th poorest.
Homicide rate? 7th most dangerous.
Obesity rate? 3rd fattest.
Practically any map of any measurable statistic where states are colored red for "bad" and green for "good" Arkansas will be a deep, blood, red.
But it is rude to point that out.
No, that is not rude at all. Making a flippant derogatory remark gets downvotes, people like to see numbers. Like the ones you just gave...
Highest poverty rate?
Lowest literacy rate?
Last in opportunity?
8th worst in public safety?
If you guessed California, you'd be right.
Sweeping generalities and handpicked metrics do not tell an entire story.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p...
In the US environmental regulations, the cost of producing power, labor costs, would all drive up the price of the end product in a way that makes it totally noncompetitive. That's also why the US and some other countries are investing in other ways to find lithium (among other things) on seabeds, where it's hoped that extraction would be less expensive. Of course the threat to the seabed environment is a concern, which in turn might drive up prices by imposing regulation, etc etc etc.
The worst place in the world for this is Italy. Every time I go there they find some esoteric rule to ticket me for. This time in Padova, apparently I drove in an area where only locals are allowed to drive. Bunch of swindlers.
This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.
> Mineral rights are automatically included as a part of the land in a property conveyance, unless and until the ownership gets separated at some point by an owner/seller.
> Since sellers of land can convey only property that they own, each sale of the land after the minerals are separated automatically includes only the land. Deeds to the land made after the first separation of the minerals will not refer to the fact that the mineral rights are not included.
> in most cases, you cannot determine whether you own the rights to the minerals under your land just by looking at your deed. Owners are sometimes surprised to find out someone else owns the rights to the minerals under their land
> U.S. laws regulating mining and mineral rights typically prohibit mineral owners from damaging or interfering with the use of any homes or other improvements on the land when extracting minerals. As a result, mineral owners do not typically attempt mineral extraction in highly populated areas. This means that if you live in a city, or an area with many houses on small plots of land, you probably won't need to worry about whether or not you own any minerals that might be under you
In an export model, yes. However, given their negative externalities (including geo-political factors), importing countries may place tariffs on Chinese lithium in order to make use of other sources.
If the total embodied value of lithium in any particular product is small compared to the overall value of the product, the tariff might not represent a significant drag on the indigenous industry.
Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
Or are they literally just announcing that "Hey, we told the computer to tell us something, so it told us something"? Yes, that is how it works. The computer will always tell you something if you make it tell you something. That isn't the hard part. The hard part is getting it to tell you things that correspond to reality.
In the absence of validation, this means very little, especially in an environment where the USGS is fairly incentivized to loudly announce to the world that we've totes got plenty of lithium, my fellow countries, any effort to keep lithium away from us is just a waste of time, look at us just rolling in lithium over here.
Or, maybe they did do the validation, and it's just the reporting that doesn't consider that an important aspect of the story. Somewhere between funding and press release someone's lost the trail but I don't know who exactly.
This kind of article can perhaps be understood as an attempt to turn a federal organization's sails into the prevailing political winds, so to speak, at a time when funding seems insecure. I say this as someone who strongly supports most of the survey's mission. It would be ideal if national power brokers recognized the value of water science, geology, ecology, etc, on their own terms.
To be honest, the energy problem is more or less a solved problem with the current technologies we have. We just need to accelerate our pace of adoption to hard-reverse on fossil fuels (except Germany). We already have large reserves of Uranium, of which only a small amount is needed to fuel a power plant. We already have lithium battery tech to store the power. We already have solar panels being mass produced and adopted to fill in the gaps. All we need is connecting the dots and making sure these resources play well with each other in symbiosis.
> The study, which was published in Science Advances, can be found at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8149 .
It would be amazing for some low weight, low volume, high energy density, high discharge rate, high charge rate, cheaply manufactured from abundant materials, low thermal sensitivity, high thermal tolerance, low passive loss, non-explosive, high cycle count, low memory, shelf stable battery chemistry to appear, but thus far every one fails in several of the categories.
This is ludicrously off-base for fossil fuels, even if we're only talking about local pollutants from the plants themselves, nevermind things like Exxon Valdez or the pipelines or the act of mining. Nuclear seems likely, though as the other commenter noted it's not a magic bullet either.
> Global reforestation is almost entirely the result of households switching from wood to coal in the 20th century.
This is a European phenomena mostly, and is a result of urbanization mostly.
I'm skeptical. China is already mass-producing batteries, securing as much lithium as possible. Additionally, US regulations will significantly increase costs for battery manufacturers.
They do if they want to get the intention of a Venture Capitalist!
So, the so-called therapeutic dose of lithium is merely a sub-toxic level, and must be monitored by frequent blood tests.
There are horrific side effects from using lithium in the long term, including convulsions, hair loss, diarrhea, suicidal and homicidal ideations, and extreme thirst (polydipsia).
So personally, I would rather not be tapping into lithium reserves for my health.
I would hazard a guess that with better tuning, XGBoost would still have won. (The paper notes that the authors chose a suboptimal set of hyperparameters out of fear of overfitting - maybe the same logic justifies choosing a suboptimal model type...)
The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy.
> is a result of urbanization mostly
Urbanization, made possible by the economical source of energy that is fossil fuels.
So yea desert sand is essentially free, even if you pay for shipping.
It's in a caldera in a mountain that I-80 bypassed to go through Winnemuca, Nevada. Nearest town is Mill City, NV, which is listed as a ghost town, despite being next to I-80 and a main line railroad track. The mine site is about 12km from Mill City on a dirt road not tracked by Google Street View.
Google Earth shows signs of development near Mill City. Looks like a trailer park and a truck stop. The road to the mine looks freshly graded. Nothing at the mine site yet.
It's a good place for a mine. There are no neighbors for at least 10km, but within 15km, there's good road and rail access.
I haven't read in detail what their validation strategy is but this seems like the kind of problem where it's not so easy as you'd think -- you need to be very careful about how you stratify your train, dev, and test sets. A random 80/10/10 split would be way too optimistic: your model would just learn to interpolate between geographically proximate locations. You'd probably need to cross-validate across different geographic areas.
This also seems like an application that would benefit from "active learning". given that drilling and testing is expensive, you'd want to choose where to collect new data based on where it would best update your model's accuracty. A similar-ish ML story comes from Flint, MI [1] though the ending is not so happy
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/how-m...
Searching in Google Maps, Thacker Mine comes up as 40.58448942010599, -117.8912129833345. As you say, that is near I-80 and Mill City, and there is nothing there.
But Wikipedia says it's at 41.70850912415866, -118.05475061324945 in the McDermitt Caldera, nowhere near Mill City or I-80.
I'm thinking probably don't trust Google on this one. :)
Currently: 64% coal, lots of nat gas, ~20 renewables.
The future plan is to use a lot more industrial waste heat. Burning garbage is done and planned, but nowhere near a major factor. Not to mention that the garbage would also need to come from something: plastics from oil, wood from trees etc.
Can you expand on this? How does the density of fossil fuel make them a better source of energy than say wind?
It's high time we realize that Pax Americana is our era to lose, (re)start mining and (re)start development.
It's also worth noting that Chinese prices are so low that certain tariffs can reach the stratosphere (eg: American 100% tariff on Chinese EVs), further making them unpopular with the commons.
Very good work - but typically we don't build prospectivity models this way (or rather we don't validate them this way anymore). Great to see the USGS starting to dip their toe back in this though, they and the GSC were long the leaders in this, but have dropped it on the last 5-7 years.
It is interesting to see how much of this data could be modelled based on wastewater brines from other industries in the area, assuming we go on to mine the lithium it will say a lot if the ML predictions prove accurate.
One thing I couldn't tell, and its probably just a limitation of how much time I could spend reading the source paper, is what method would be needed to extract the bulk of the lithium expected to be there. If processing brine water is sufficient that may be easier to control externalities than if they have to strip mine and get all the overburden out of the way first.
"Lithium Americas will contract with a bus company to drive workers an hour to the site for 10-hour work shifts, he added. An additional two hours will be added for transportation time. If you go to work on our project, you will have free room and board and free transportation to the site every day. You would get three free meals a day." If you're an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia, that might look good.
[1] https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2024/oct/12/nevada-operati...
we don't need it happening upstream.
and watch as the nations destroy themselves (ecosystems)
However, kriging is really quite difficult to use with non-continuous inputs. RF is a lot more forgiving there. You don't need to develop a covariance model for discrete values (or a covariance model for how the different inputs relate, either).
It's mining brine. I.e. the "mines" are basically deep water wells.
The limestone itself doesn't have any lithium. It's the water in the pores in the limestone that is relatively concentrated in lithium.
In most of these cases, you're already producing brines from the smackover formation as a part of existing oil and gas production, but the brine is being re-injecting after oil is separated from it. The idea is that it's better to keep those and evaporate them down for lithium production.
That does require large evaporation ponds, generally speaking, but it's not strip mining.
[1]: I'm working on a DB of water quality, https://www.cleartap.com/water-systems/AR0000550
Lithium supply is not an issue. Here in oz we have plenty, there is surplus in market (see current lithium prices).
Conversion however is an issue, majority of plants are in China. Build some refiners that turn it into lithium carbonate and oz will fill them.
As far as evap ponds go, are there usually chemicals or elements in the same brine water as lithium that is important when evaporating into the atmosphere?
All those minerals. All that sunshine. Terrific combo.
h/t Saul Griffith.
People in the U.S. would rather be slaves to China than be self sufficient as we once were...
https://www.rangerminerals.com/what-does-fee-simple-estate-o...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...
Then I asked chatgpt and it refused to make a map but said that I should just look on the map for Thacker Pass, which is almost right but it also said I should look northeast of Winnemucca, which isn't correct. It's north and west.
Zero for two, for robots.
Do you have the same trepidation about aluminum, iron, dish soap, and table salt? I ask because the amount of "ripping open" involved in lithium production is like a speck in the eye of a whale compared to all the other mining. In terms of scale all existing and proposed lithium mines are teensy tiny by the standards of mines.
First and foremost, here are definitely lots of other salts. It is brine, after all. You produce a lot of halite (salt), gypsum, calcite, and all kinds of other evaporite minerals.
There are all kinds of things in smaller concentrations, though.
What comes out of a oil/water separator would need lots of additional processing before going to something like an evap pond. It's relatively hazardous stuff for a lot of reasons other than oil (e.g. it can be rather radioactive). It typically goes through quite a bit of additional processing unless it's being immediately reinjected.
Which, for those of us that like moonscape, is a bit sad. But there is a lot of moonscape in that region, and there aren’t a huge number of moonscape fans. At least that are going to try to picket any projects. So overall, meh.
That area of Nevada is also pretty economically ‘challenged’, so why not.
The issue with fossil fuels is that they liberate fossil carbon, which has larger macro effects on the global environment. (It injects a lot of ‘new’ carbon into the carbon cycle)
They also do sometimes have some medium sized local effects from spills or contamination. But those can usually be controlled.
Geothermal is also usually ‘low footprint/high value’, but is only viable in specific limited locations.
Solar, wind, hydropower, tidal energy all have large physical footprints for the amount of energy they produce. Aka ‘low density’. All are also somewhat tied to specific, and often limited geology.
For solar for instance, areas with a lot of desert or other open ‘non productive’ land nearby, it’s great (assuming decent insolation). In areas where land is at a premium for other uses, or is very rugged/high maintenance, it definitely is a problem. Aka cities, certain types of high intensity farmland, heavily forested areas, high snow load/storm areas, etc.
Solar is not an awesome economic choice in Siberia, for example. It is an awesome economic choice in Southern California, Arizona, Nevada, etc.
For areas with geography that supports it (typically the right kind of mountain ranges) and rainfall, hydropower is awesome, though has serious side effects on wildlife and river health. For a place that doesn’t have the right geography (say England), it’s a non starter.
Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while a oil well will eventually run dry.
The idea that fossil fuels are more ecologically favorable because it's 'dense' needs to address not only external factors, but that fossil fuels are non-renewable.
"to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands."
https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...
Perhaps more true in that the wind (as far as we know) won’t run out but wind turbines do have a limited lifespan. After 20-30 years they usually need to be replaced. Some of the components are recycled but a significant portion - including the blades - are either not recyclable or not economically recyclable. Work is being done on this but there’s no guarantee it’ll produce dividends.
At a particular scale, this is entirely correct; if what I'm looking for is 'large', a measurement 1m away from a known hit would also be likely to be a hit.
That particular issue sounds like it should be addressed with more negative samples.
Cops trying to catch drunks speeding home after the bars have closed. In the south, last call was 2:45AM where I served as a freshly-turned 21 year old.
What analysis do you point to that suggests fossil fuels have a smaller impact than, say, wind?
No I wouldn't.
California's poverty rate is lower than Arkansas', and California's literacy rate is higher five other states' (practically tied with Arkansas).
https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17826#P675e89693a5...
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/src/PDF/STATE.pd...
Also, I'm in California right now for work.
It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Places with billboards aren't my vibe and when every other one is an ad for a personal injury or drunk driving attorney the place is DEFINITELY not for me.
Still not as bad as Arkansas, though.
Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.
1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro
2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.
3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.
4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.
5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.
6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.
7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.
Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.
New oil fields get found as well. Many oil wells are still producing from as far back as the early 1900’s.
That wind farm as built definitely won’t last forever.
So theoretically, sure.
Practically, it isn’t as straightforward. Especially if the only land someone has doesn’t actually get good wind. That’s all.
What is ‘leftover’ from an abandoned well can be as simple as a buried 6” ground level plug, or as messy as an acre of abandoned equipment and a giant oil spill/hazmat area. Plus a billion tons of atmospheric co2 - which is invisible.
If you drive I5 in California through the Central Valley, you’ll see hundreds of active oil wells that have been active since the early 1900’s, mixed in with active orchards and farmlands. They are a bit hard to find. Like this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TiWATTxP1jWmu4Et7?g_st=com.google.ma...]. And this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSeCzys8W2q4ubeJ9?g_st=com.google.ma...].
What you won’t see is that even downtown Los Angeles has similar wells that still produce significant oil hidden in special buildings.
If you take a little detour, you can see the thousands of acres of windmills in Tehachapi that produce similar amounts of total energy. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TBVn1JUbgqSYTduu5?g_st=com.google.ma...].
And if you keep driving, you can see the thousands of acres of solar farms that are doing similar. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/XGBtWZLppWH7vjqc8?g_st=com.google.ma...]
Oil is so widely used because it is incredibly cheap and easy to use at large scale, with minimal obviously visible consequence.
Because co2 is invisible. And as long as we don’t spill large quantities of it, it doesn’t seem to cause any visible problems.
The effect of the low density from wind, solar, etc. isn’t visible until you go to areas it is widely deployed and then do the math on how much energy they are actually producing, which is a small fraction of what would be produced if the same area was impacted to produce oil or nuclear.
Activists think in terms of unambiguous moral purity instead of trade-offs.
https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/locations-yellowstone-hots...
I specifically went out of my way on a trip a couple years ago to check out Thacker Pass to see where this planned Lithium mine was going. Unfortunately there was thick smoke followed a significant thunderstorm as a front came through and I didn't get to explore much.
All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.
If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.
This mining offsets mining for other things that is happening at several orders of magnitude larger scale. Oil, coal, gas, etc. mining is huge and lithium batteries plus renewables are already reducing the need for those. So, the transition to renewables and batteries might actually result in a net reduction of mining.
Of course doing lithium mining cleanly and responsibly is an important topic. Especially in places close to where people live. But considering the vast amounts of other stuff we mine already at a much larger scale than we'll ever need to mine lithium, this is a drop in the ocean.
And of course the lithium that is mined can be used and recycled over and over again. Once it is in circulation, we'll be re-using it forever. And given the improvements in battery tech, production processes, etc. the amount currently in circulation is likely to power a larger amount of battery capacity when we do recycle it eventually. Even when considering inevitable losses during recycling.
Lithium recycling processes are working fine already of course but there's very little recycling being done at scale for the simple reason that most lithium batteries in use are still very young and quite far away from needing any recycling. If anything, the improved life times of batteries is pushing the date that we need to be recycling at scale further and further away.
Extraction methods very much depend on composition of the deposits and whether they are in brine or other form and what other materials are present. There's a wide variety of brines, rock compositions, clays, etc with some lithium in them.
4-5 digits should be enough for any use outside of surveying, that's a precision of 10 meters and 1 meter respectively.
Even Wikipedia is making me suspicious by using hundredths of arc seconds, despite linking the document that came from. How do you localize a mining site down to a single foot?
They explain it for selecting the hyper parameters for ML models:
> In this article, we talk about Bayesian Optimization, a suite of techniques often used to tune hyperparameters. More generally, Bayesian Optimization can be used to optimize any black-box function.
But the example at the beginning of the article is mining gold:
> Let us start with the example of gold mining. Our goal is to mine for gold in an unknown land 1 . For now, we assume that the gold is distributed about a line. We want to find the location along this line with the maximum gold while only drilling a few times (as drilling is expensive).