6 ms·

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

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

diggernet 2y ago
Your description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link. 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. :)
- Animats 2y ago
  Right. The Nevada Appeal, which actually has people on the ground, has far more info.[1] North of Thacker Pass is the area to look. The mine is building their own rail yard west of Winnemuca. The mine will be an open-pit mine like a coal mine. Sawtooth Mining division of North American Coal will do the mining. Dig down 350 feet, take out clay with lithium, process, put back clay without lithium. The processing plant will be at Thacker Pass. Big plant, maybe 1800 people. Lithium in clay is a new thing - the usual input is brine. Also a sulfuric acid plant, a power plant, housing, etc. Project assumes a loan of US$2.3 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy. "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-operation-could-be-largest-lithium-resource-in-north-america/ https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2024/oct/12/nevada-operati...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - CSSer 2y ago
    And they can all visit us at Burning Man every year!
- mjrpes 2y ago
  Looks like Google got "Thacker Pass Lithium Mine" in the McDermitt Caldera confused with an old gold mine called "Thacker Placer Mine" that was southeast of Mill City: https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/ https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    Yeah I asked Google Gemini to make a map showing the three principle lithium developments of Nevada and it pinned the historical Thacker Mine, not the new Thacker Pass Mine. 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.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :) 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?
  - lobsterthief 2y ago
    I assume single foot would be what they consider to be the center of the mine? Though I don’t know how Wikipedia would have that information yet; maybe it’s the default output of their map selector or something. An actual survey of the mine would need to be done to know where its center is
  - jaystraw 2y ago
    could be artificial precision coming from degs min sec to decimal??
  - Animats 2y ago
    Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big. If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1] The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken. The mine hasn't built their side yet. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.69949298,-118.07068085,1508.99572754a,0d,60y,31.23177164h,87.2094364t,0r/data=CnsaTRJHCiUweDU0YjRkZTcyODcxNGQ2Mjc6MHg4N2E3NmQ4MzgwZGU2ZTE0GTAJvDiW2URAIWcdn9qqhF3AKgxUaGFja2VyIFBhc3MYASABIiYKJAmWCHk2EcdEQBGjFqrb6nlEQBmmBNu2BFRdwCFZi567bMNdwEICCAEiGgoWRzFaVWNDS2FVS3ZqZFRIUTJWbVMxZxACSg0I____________ARAA https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.6994929...
skyfaller 2y ago
Not everyone agrees that this is a good place for a mine: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ 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-sands https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...
- MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - simgt 2y ago
    It's because there are people with unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests of corporations would be left.
  - shmageggy 2y ago
    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 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-pass-is-a-bright-green-lie/ https://www.protectthackerpass.org/mining-lithium-at-thacker...
    - robocat 2y ago
      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.

diggernet 2y ago

Your description of the location of this mine doesn't match your Wikipedia link. 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. :)

Animats 2y ago
Right. The Nevada Appeal, which actually has people on the ground, has far more info.[1] North of Thacker Pass is the area to look. The mine is building their own rail yard west of Winnemuca. The mine will be an open-pit mine like a coal mine. Sawtooth Mining division of North American Coal will do the mining. Dig down 350 feet, take out clay with lithium, process, put back clay without lithium. The processing plant will be at Thacker Pass. Big plant, maybe 1800 people. Lithium in clay is a new thing - the usual input is brine. Also a sulfuric acid plant, a power plant, housing, etc. Project assumes a loan of US$2.3 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy. "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-operation-could-be-largest-lithium-resource-in-north-america/ https://www.nevadaappeal.com/news/2024/oct/12/nevada-operati...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- CSSer 2y ago
  And they can all visit us at Burning Man every year!
mjrpes 2y ago
Looks like Google got "Thacker Pass Lithium Mine" in the McDermitt Caldera confused with an old gold mine called "Thacker Placer Mine" that was southeast of Mill City: https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/ https://westernmininghistory.com/mine-detail/10042614/
- jeffbee 2y ago
  Yeah I asked Google Gemini to make a map showing the three principle lithium developments of Nevada and it pinned the historical Thacker Mine, not the new Thacker Pass Mine. 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.
Dylan16807 2y ago
I don't trust latitudes and longitudes that are precise down to the nanometer. :) 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?
- lobsterthief 2y ago
  I assume single foot would be what they consider to be the center of the mine? Though I don’t know how Wikipedia would have that information yet; maybe it’s the default output of their map selector or something. An actual survey of the mine would need to be done to know where its center is
- jaystraw 2y ago
  could be artificial precision coming from degs min sec to decimal??
- Animats 2y ago
  Right. If you look at the area in Google Earth, you can see lots of small dirt roads and little round areas which are probably test drilling sites, spread over tens of square kilometers. Like most open-pit mines, it will be big. If you want exact coordinates, here's the future mine entrance in Google Earth.[1] The county or state widened the road, put in a turn-off, added turning lanes, and posted a "Mine Entrance" road sign. The turn-off dead ends within ten meters at the property line, as of when the picture was taken. The mine hasn't built their side yet. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.69949298,-118.07068085,1508.99572754a,0d,60y,31.23177164h,87.2094364t,0r/data=CnsaTRJHCiUweDU0YjRkZTcyODcxNGQ2Mjc6MHg4N2E3NmQ4MzgwZGU2ZTE0GTAJvDiW2URAIWcdn9qqhF3AKgxUaGFja2VyIFBhc3MYASABIiYKJAmWCHk2EcdEQBGjFqrb6nlEQBmmBNu2BFRdwCFZi567bMNdwEICCAEiGgoWRzFaVWNDS2FVS3ZqZFRIUTJWbVMxZxACSg0I____________ARAA https://earth.google.com/web/search/Thacker+Pass/@41.6994929...

skyfaller 2y ago

Not everyone agrees that this is a good place for a mine: https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ 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-sands https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/the-long-shadow-of-the-tar...

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
[flagged]
- simgt 2y ago
  It's because there are people with unambiguous moral purity opposing these projects that we can have a trade-off. Without them, nothing that goes against the unambiguous selfish interests of corporations would be left.
- shmageggy 2y ago
  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 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-pass-is-a-bright-green-lie/ https://www.protectthackerpass.org/mining-lithium-at-thacker...
  - robocat 2y ago
    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.