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RENO, Nev. (AP) — An extremely rare wildflower that grows only in Nevada’s high desert where an Australian mining company wants to dig for lithium should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Thursday. The conclusion announced on Thursday that federal protection is warranted could jeopardize Ioneer Ltd.’s plans to build the mine halfway between Reno and Las Vegas. It’s an early test of the Biden administration’s ability to make good on promises to protect public lands and their native species while at the same time pursuing an ambitious clean energy agenda that...

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere — in phones, laptops, tablets, cameras and increasingly cars. Demand for lithium-ion batteries has risen sharply in the past five years and is expected to grow from a $44.2 billion market in 2020 to a $94.4 billion market by 2025, mostly due to the boom in electric cars. And a shortage of lithium-ion batteries is looming in the U.S.Former Tesla CTO and Elon Musk's right-hand man, JB Straubel, started Redwood Materials in 2017 to help address the need for more raw materials and to solve the problem of e-waste. The company recycles end-of-life batteries and then...

In just one year, the world’s largest lithium producers turned from cautiously optimistic about prices and very careful about expansion projects to decisively bullish on near, medium, and long-term demand for the key battery metal. The pandemic prompted many governments to commit to greener recovery and to raising significantly the share of renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs), stoking demand for critical minerals this year. Lithium, alongside copper, has seen prices rising since automakers started pledging all-EV lineups and exponential growth in their electric car offerings. Rising immediate demand for lithium and expectations of surging demand in the longer term...

From key fobs to remote for toys, lithium batteries are everywhere in our homes, but many parents are not aware of just how dangerous they can be for children; Chris Martinez reports for CBS2. Video at site.

Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new researchIs there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine. Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries. Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material. A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner...

For the longest while I have been asking, “Where do environmentalists and Democrats think all these batteries for our oil-free transportation fleet are going to come from?” It seems they think there is a Battery Fairy out there somewhere who will magically supply the ginormous battery capacity, and additional supply of electricity to charge them, in order to deliver us to our blessed fossil-fuel-free future. So kudos to Wired magazine on “The Spiraling Environmental Cost of our Lithium Battery Addiction,” which reminds us that there are, you know, tradeoffs between various kinds of energy systems we might use: Demand for...

Part funded by King’s College London, the study is a meta-analysis of three decades of research in Austria, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, UK, Japan and USA. It concludes that lithium’s “protective” abilities could be further tested by “randomised community trials of lithium supplementation of the water supply” in communities with high prevalence of mental health conditions and risk of suicide. Deliberately lacing the water supply with a mind-altering chemical in some zones might seem like something out of a science fiction novel [duh], but the authors of the report...think it’s an idea worth experimenting. You cannot blame scientists for thinking outside...

For communities with a low rate of depression and suicide, there may be something in the water, according to a new study. A comprehensive analysis of findings from previous studies has revealed that regions where the public drinking water contains a high level of naturally occurring lithium — a mineral used most often for the treatment of depression and bipolar disorder — also boast a lower rate of suicide than other areas. The review included all prior research on the effects of lithium, as well as regional water samples and suicide data from 1,286 locales in Austria, Greece, Italy, Lithuania,...

Naturally occurring lithium in public drinking water may have an anti-suicidal effect - according to a new study. [From about 1950-1990, lithium was usually the first choice for severe bipolar disease - clinical depression is a major risk factor for suicide]

A schematic showing lithium battery with the new carbon nanotube architecture for the anode Credit: Juran Noh/Texas A&M University College of Engineering Cell phone batteries often heat up and, at times, can burst into flames. In most cases, the culprit behind such incidents can be traced back to lithium batteries. Despite providing long-lasting electric currents that can keep devices powered up, lithium batteries can internally short circuit, heating up the device. Researchers at Texas A&M University have invented a technology that can prevent lithium batteries from heating and failing. Their carbon nanotube design for the battery's conductive plate, called the...

A new type of battery is coming onto the market that can store multiple days’ worth of energy, that doesn’t degrade, can’t possibly explode and is up to five times cheaper than lithium-ion, claimed its developer as it prepares to pilot the technology in New York state. The zinc-air hybrid flow battery developed by Canadian company Zinc8 has the potential to disrupt the entire energy-storage market — making wind and solar farms baseload and even replacing the need for transmission grid upgrades in many places. “For large-scale energy storage, lithium-ion can’t touch us on cost,” says chief executive Ron MacDonald,...

KIST researchers developed cathode material of carbon-silicon complex by simply mixing and heating silicon mixed with oil with green ingredients corn and sweet potato starch. If batteries made of this material are installed in electric vehicles, the driving range will more than double. Credit: Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) _______________________________________________________________________________________ Dr. Hun-Gi Jung and his research team at the Center for Energy Storage Research of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Lee Byung Gwon) have announced the development of silicon anode materials that can increase battery capacity four-fold in comparison to graphite anode materials and...

Lithium is expensive, environmentally questionable in large volumes, and tends to catch on fire from time to time. It's the best solution we've currently got for EV and device battery storage, but other alternatives are starting to surface, and one that could actually make a fair bit of sense is the potassium metal battery.

2019 provided us with a number of battery breakthroughs that could change how we power our grids, our devices and also our modes of transport SergeyNivens/Depositphotos View 7 Images Many corners of society stand to gain from advances in battery technology, from automakers, to manufacturers of consumer electronics to all that care about the environment. This year offered a little something for everybody with an interest in this area of science, bringing us tech that could charge electric vehicles in 10 minutes, batteries that suck carbon dioxide out of the air and news that the world’s biggest battery is set...

Link Only in Post 1 due to copyright complaint Essentially Russia helped Morales cheat. Rosatom agreed to build a nuke plant in Bolivia. All of this was so Rosatom could mine the massive Bolivian lithium deposits.

For every soldier on the battlefield, electric car battery or guts of a smartphone or solar panel, there is lithium to help power them. Now, a Williamsport-based company has been able to extract the mineral right beneath the region’s feet. Through a patented process, Eureka Resources, headquartered at 454 Pine St., has developed a technique at its Bradford County plant to extract the rare earth mineral — in high demand and short supply in the United States — from wastewater flowback used in the hydraulic fracturing process in the Marcellus Shale. “We’re excited our company that purifies water, salt and...

While most reconfigurable materials can toggle between two distinct states, the way a switch toggles on or off, the new material's shape can be finely tuned, adjusting its physical properties as desired. The material, which has potential applications in next-generation energy storage and bio-implantable micro-devices, was developed by a joint Caltech-Georgia Tech-ETH Zurich team in the lab of Julia R. Greer. Most materials that are designed to change shape require a persistent external stimulus to change from one shape to another and stay that way: for example, they may be one shape when wet and a different shape when dry—like...

LOS ANGELES — One of the crew members aboard the dive boat Conception hadn’t been asleep long when a noise jolted him awake. He swung open the door of the wheelhouse — the top level of the 75-foot boat, located just above the galley — and was greeted by flames. As the fire raged in the predawn hours of Labor Day, the vessel’s captain made a frantic mayday call to the Coast Guard. Then he and four crew members jumped from the wheelhouse and climbed into a dinghy to get help from the Grape Escape, a fishing boat anchored nearby...

2018 was a terrible year for commodities, but few sectors fared as badly as lithium. The crucial battery metal, also known as “White petroleum”, struggled through a 50 percent price correction as supply soared and demand fears spread like wildfire. But it isn’t time to give up on lithium stocks just yet. The rising stars of the hard-rock lithium space are transforming the industry with their remarkable ability to extract lithium at a lower cost and faster pace than the lithium majors can from their brine deposits. In short, there’s a new caliber of producer in town and - with...

Lithium is a potent psychiatric drug, one of the primary prescribed medications for bipolar disorder. But it’s also an element that occurs naturally all over the Earth’s crust — including in bodies of water. That means that small quantities of lithium wind up in the tap water you consume every day. Just how much is in the water varies quite a bit from place to place. Naturally, that made researchers curious: Are places with more lithium in the water healthier, mentally? Do places with more lithium have less depression or bipolar or — most importantly of all — fewer suicides?...