Discoveries and inventions

[Rick Potter]

Have you ever noticed how sometimes, seemingly unsolvable problems seem to lessen because of a timely invention or discovery? Like maybe polio vaccine, penicillin or the Aids Cocktail, and like the cotton gin, or steam power?

In the discovery category, we have a new entrant. With the rise of the electric cars and such....it was just announced on an investment program that they have discovered a Lithium deposit larger than Australia's, in Canada, North of Quebec. Large investments are already starting.

Seems to me this should lessen some of the concerns about getting it from Africa and China.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

There is a long boring Indy film about life in and around the lithium salt flats in Bolivia or Argentina. I thought most of the Lithium salts came from South America.

That film seems to have disappeared from the web. It may have been in Chile. It follows an ancient hermit person trying to survive in a desolate place. There is almost no dialogue. The continuous loading and trucking of salt in the background stretches off to the horizon, a seemingly endless sea of salt, many feet deep.

[Larry Frank]

The McDermitt Caldera on the border of Nevada and Oregon is a huge lithium deposit. The EV batteries also need a lot of graphite and a new mine in Alaska is opening.

[Stan Calow]

I thought I read that they had also discovered large deposits in California, in the Salton Sea area.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I thought I read that they had also discovered large deposits in California, in the Salton Sea area.

The farmer with his plow that punctured the gas main near Pullman Washington had me thinking of the Salton Sea yesterday. If I remember the story correctly, another farmer doing a little digging, accidentally diverted the Colorado river creating the Salton Sea.

[Pat Germain]

The farmer with his plow that punctured the gas main near Pullman Washington had me thinking of the Salton Sea yesterday. If I remember the story correctly, another farmer doing a little digging, accidentally diverted the Colorado river creating the Salton Sea.

It was the Army Corps of Engineers who created the Salton Sea. It's now saltier than the ocean and the whole area is a toxic mess. But yeah, there are MASSIVE deposits of lithium in that area and efforts are already underway to extract them.

The narrative that most or all lithium for EV batteries comes from Chinese strip mines is completely false. As mentioned above, most of lithium currently comes from South America.

[Doug Garson]

Interesting data, some studies report the price of EV batteries using lithium ion technology has dropped almost 90% from $1355/ kWh in 2008 to $153/kWh in 2022 and is predicted to drop an additional 40% to $99 kWh by 2025 and another 40% to around $58/kWh by 2030. Another study reports the cost of the battery for an EV in 2016 was about 49% of the total EV cost and will drop to about 19% by 2030.

[Brian Tymchak]

If I remember the story correctly, another farmer doing a little digging, accidentally diverted the Colorado river creating the Salton Sea.

It was the Army Corps of Engineers who created the Salton Sea.

I had heard that the Salton Sea was formed by a flood of the Colorado River.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I read somewhere, I think it may be in the book The Dead Marsh, that farmers using the Colorado River to irrigate created a silt problem. The Army Corps then went to work on the silt problem. During this work a big flood occurred and the river diverted into the Salton Sink.

The Dead Marsh, Or the Silent Marsh, Must have been an article or obscure publication. It is about selenium contamination in a different area. I think it came from The Common Reader book magazine. Another thing I am not finding on the web.

[Jim Koepke]

This is from the California Department of Fish & Wildlife:

The Salton Sea, located in southern Riverside and northern Imperial counties in Southern California, is California' s largest lake (map at right). Although large seas have cyclically formed and dried over historic time in the basin due to natural flooding from the Colorado River, the current Salton Sea was formed when Colorado River floodwater breached an irrigation canal being constructed in the Imperial Valley in 1905 and flowed into the Salton Sink. The Sea has since been maintained by irrigation runoff in the Imperial and Coachella valleys and local rivers. Because the Sea is a terminal lake, increasingly concentrated salts have resulted in a salinity that is currently 50 percent greater than that of the ocean.

https://wildlife.ca.gov/Regions/6/Sa...ram/Background

Naturally, this does not dismiss other events from also being involved in the history of the Salton Sea.

jtk

[Kent A Bathurst]

Interesting data, some studies report the price of EV batteries using lithium ion technology has dropped almost 90% from $1355/ kWh in 2008 to $153/kWh in 2022 and is predicted to drop an additional 40% to $99 kWh by 2025 and another 40% to around $58/kWh by 2030. Another study reports the cost of the battery for an EV in 2016 was about 49% of the total EV cost and will drop to about 19% by 2030.

Yeah, and if Toyota [and others] deliver on their solid-state batteries the price of lithium ion batteries for autos goes to zero. The massive new lithium deposits will remain barely touched, if at all.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriew...h=1bae2e11592c

Tech advances astound - continually. My Kansas grandfather farmers used to tell me about seeing the first tractors on farms. And they lived to see Neil Armstrong live on TV from the moon.

[Doug Garson]

I can still remember several decades ago we visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The director at that time had witnessed the second Wright brothers flight in person and watched the first man to walk on the moon on TV.
In my working career, I went from using a slide rule to a laptop.

Don't think the Toyota solid state battery will reduce demand for lithium, they still use lithium, the difference is they don't use a liquid electrolyte. "Long seen as a potential game-changer for BEVs, Toyota has made a technological breakthrough in its quest to improve the durability of Li-Ion solid-state batteries."
https://newsroom.toyota.eu/toyotas-a...e%20batteries.

[Bill Dufour]

The Dead Marsh, Or the Silent Marsh, Must have been an article or obscure publication. It is about selenium contamination in a different area. I think it came from The Common Reader book magazine. Another thing I am not finding on the web.[/QUOTE]

Probably the kesterson wildlife refuge. Farmers drained subsurface irrigation water into it to make a lake for wildlife. This water contains pesticides and selenium killing the migrating birds it was supposed to help.
Bill D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kester...ildlife_Refuge

[Maurice Mcmurry]

The Dead Marsh, Or the Silent Marsh, Must have been an article or obscure publication. It is about selenium contamination in a different area. I think it came from The Common Reader book magazine. Another thing I am not finding on the web.

Probably the kesterson wildlife refuge. Farmers drained subsurface irrigation water into it to make a lake for wildlife. This water contains pesticides and selenium killing the migrating birds it was supposed to help.
Bill D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kester...ildlife_Refuge[/QUOTE]

Thanks Bill. That is the place and the sad story.

This was interesting about the Salton Sea.
Truly CA | Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea | Truly CA | Season 3 | Episode 2 | PBS

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I can still remember several decades ago we visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The director at that time had witnessed the second Wright brothers flight in person and watched the first man to walk on the moon on TV.

I love the back story of the Wright Flyer replica that is in the museum at Kitty Hawk. It was built in the workshop at the Smithsonian Institute. If I remember correctly the replica cost a million dollars and took a team of workers a year to build. The Wright Brothers built the original in a few weeks with a few dollars.