Lithium Mining May Destruct and Pollute Nevada Tribal Lands

"White gold rush" demand increases as the worldwide market needs more lithium batteries for several industries. However, such demand poses a threat to Nevada's tribal lands.

Lithium Mining Threat on Tribal Lands

In Nevada, more than 17,000 lithium mining claims have been filed, the majority of which are on Native American land. Due to its resemblance to the gold rush in California in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was given the term "white gold rush."

According to Newsweek, the majority of the lithium (Li) used in the United States is mined in Australia and South America, according to Michael A. McKibben, a professor of lithium research at the University of California, Riverside.

It is purified and converted into cathodes in Asia, which are then delivered to the US and Western Europe for the construction of automobile electric battery systems.

According to CNBC, due to a strong price increase of more than 700% since January 2021, lithium has attracted a lot of attention in recent months. Prices have increased even further in some regions, such as the Chinese spot market.

Its consumption has significantly increased as a result of the demand for electric vehicles, smartphones, and stationary electrical grid storage batteries. Lithium carbonate costs more than $70,000 per metric ton (2,200 lbs) now, up over 500 percent in the last two years.

Lithium Mining Threatens to Nevada Tribal Lands

Three-quarters of the proposed mining locations are on tribal grounds in Nevada. Lithium mining is harmful and polluting, raising fears that it would destroy the surrounding area and destroy the sacred value of the land to the indigenous tribes.

The Thacker Pass mining site in northwest Nevada, which is anticipated to generate at least 80,000 tons of lithium annually, is also where several Native Americans were massacred in 1865, according to Shelley Harjo, a member of the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone tribe. According to Harjo, the Tahker Pass mining site will represent the greatest rape and desecration of a well-known Native American massacre location in the region.

According to McKibben, current traditional mining practices of hard-rock granitic lithium pegmatite deposits (Australia) and soft-rock salar (dry lake) bed brine deposits (Chile and Argentina) are both quite harmful to the environment in terms of upsetting the surface of the land. It uses a lot of water and leaves a significant environmental footprint.

Many of the possible Nevadan deposits are found in worn volcanics and the sediments they have produced, which are neither particularly soft nor particularly hard like salar brine deposits. Numerous Nevadan deposits still call for open-pit mining, blasting, crushing, roasting, and acid leaching processes similar to those used in granite.

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Why does the extraction of lithium harm the environment?

Resource exploitation of any kind is bad for the environment, according to Euronews.green. This is due to the possibility of soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, harm to ecosystem processes, and an increase in global warming if these basic resources are removed.

However, we typically associate fossil fuels like coal and gas with the term "extraction." Unfortunately, despite opening the door for an electric future, lithium also falls under this category. It is feasible to think about lithium as the non-renewable mineral that enables renewable energy and is frequently referred to as the next oil.