We have a lot of people who need lithium.
The environmentalists will never go for this, as mining one ounce of lithium requires 24.5 kilowatts of electricity and releases 3044 cubic meters of carbon dioxide.
I just made those numbers up. But hey, why not? The greenies do that all the time. And some of them even get Nobel Prizes for it.
There is a huge lithium deposit in the Maine mountains that is worth billions of dollars but it can’t be mined due to environmental regulations.
The USA has plenty of uranium, lithium, rare earths, etc. etc..
But we shut down our industries and let others take it over because greens and government said “mines are bad!”
So until the political will changes, little or none of that will get produced here.
Its mining, so it is automatically bad and must get past many heavy duty lawsuits, file all the impact statements, get all the permits, face another round of lawsuits, go to SCOTUS if needed.
Just ask what happened to the iron sands mine in Wisconsin. Process basically used magnets to remove iron from the sand using conveyor belts, with de-ironed sand returned to pit. Killed by above processes.
Nimbys won’t allow it in the US. Mostly deposits are on Federal lands. Interior/BLM = no way. No strip mining for lithium.
I’ve researched the opportunities that could be developed in the Salton Sea area, and it is a potential goldmine. The problem is it is also an environmental disaster area that is largely unlivable due to the brackish salt water and fertilizer runoff from the Central Valley area. If they were to build the geothermal plants to extract the lithium from the brine, they would also need to desalinate the Salton Sea water to support local communities.
The solution is to also build a liquid fuel breeder nuclear reactor at the abandoned Naval bombing practice area to provide electricity and process heat to desalinate and detoxify the area. It could use spent fuel from the San Onofre reactor that is sitting in dry storage and uranium/thorium from the rare earth mining facility in Mountain Pass, CA. This would reduce the cost of storing radioactive mining waste that makes our rare earth industry uncompetitive with China.
The EPA and greenies are going to love how that stuff is mined. //sarc
Lithium is not rare. There are sizable deposits all over North America, waiting for green weenies to get out of the way and get the miners going.
If the U.S. could enter the lithium market in a big way, then why can’t we get back in the petroleum market in a big way? What’s the problem here...besides that make-believe leader of our country? Regardless of the need for lithium, the need for petroleum is much more crucial.