McDermitt Caldera in Oregon is attracting attention for what could be one of the largest lithium deposits ever identified in the U.S.
  • Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    301·
    6 days ago

    Abundance of critical minerals and lack of democracy. Very dangerous combination, deploy military democracy enforcement!

  • finnadrag@lazysoci.alEnglish
    50·
    7 days ago

    Really bizarre to write or post an article saying this deposit was ‘discovered’. This is decade old news. I saw the headline and thought ‘oh nice that’s like a whole other Thacker Pass’ but it literally is just Thacker Pass.

    Somebody needs to figure out a way to prevent people from upvoting headlines of articles they haven’t read because as far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to post or upvote this.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      4 days ago

      but it literally is just Thacker Pass.

      This isn’t Thacker Pass.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thacker_Pass_lithium_mine

      The Thacker Pass lithium mine is a lithium clay mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada

      The location being discussed:

      McDermitt Caldera in Oregon

      It looks like there was some discussion that there might be lithium there a bit back, like in 2023, but this is not decade-old news.

  • bss03@infosec.pubEnglish
    22·
    7 days ago

    Good, the children yearn for the lithium mines. /s

    Maybe I should re-train from computer programmer to lithium miner?

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    144·
    6 days ago

    RARE EARTH METALS ARE NOT RARE!

    Lithium is the 25th most abundant element in Earth’s crust!

    we see these head lines all the time because it is everywhere, the problem has never been finding it, it’s been refining it, and china has a Monopoly on the refining techniques and refuses to do business with anyone who tries to adopt the technology and restricts travel of the people with the knowledge to do so.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      Lithium is literally named after stone. No one ever claimed it is rare.

      When an X deposit is found, it means that a place has been found where an unusual concentration of a material in an easy/cheap-to-extract form has been found.

      There are thousands of tons of gold in the ocean water. But no one would call the ocean a gold deposit. Because it would require a ton of effort/money to extract a tiny amount of gold from the ocean.

  • betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish
    81·
    7 days ago

    Oil-backed GOP will make sure it doesn’t get developed until next century. “Buy oil instead you losers!”

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    I bet it’s like the one discovered in Portugal which is of a mineral form of it for which there is no technology to industrially extract the lithium.

    In other words, about as feasible as “we can extract all the <insert mineral> we want from sea water”.

  • CovfefeKills@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    7 days ago

    What happened to the last 2.5t lithium deposit? Also these deposits are just the tech to extract ever smaller amounts of valuable material from waste material right? Like oh this land has 0.0001% lithum percent but now that is profitable because advances in valuables extraction, if we crator this region.

    China isn’t special to have high concentration deposits they are special because no one is going to stop them from digging up hundreds of square/km of Earth in Africa.