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USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas

(www.usgs.gov)
300 points antidnan | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 17:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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Animats ◴[22 Oct 24 21:33 UTC] No.41918949[source]▶
There's also a big lithium deposit in Nevada, and preparations for mining are underway there.[1] General Motors put in $650 million for guaranteed access to the output of this Thacker Mine.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine

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skyfaller ◴[23 Oct 24 03:40 UTC] No.41921563[source]▶
Not everyone agrees that this is a good place for a mine: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/

"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...

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MrBuddyCasino ◴[23 Oct 24 06:31 UTC] No.41922394[source]▶
Not even the moon landing had majority support when it was planned.

Activists think in terms of unambiguous moral purity instead of trade-offs.

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shmageggy ◴[23 Oct 24 10:22 UTC] No.41923589[source]▶
Actually it looks like their arguments are presented entirely in terms of tradeoffs. They argue that the carbon benefit from electric cars (cited as very far down the list on e.g. https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions) isn’t worth the cost to biodiversity, water use and pollution, cultural values and history, peacefulness and tranquility, etc. https://www.protectthackerpass.org/mining-lithium-at-thacker...
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1. robocat ◴[23 Oct 24 11:54 UTC] No.41924040[source]▶
Their argument:

  But many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are quite minor. 
  Paul Hawken, for example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
  Producing a single electric car releases a lot of greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This is rising, as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. That means that even if operating electric cars reduces emissions overall, it’s not going to reduce them much. One calculation estimates reductions of 6 percent in the United States. That’s not enough to make much of a dent in warming.