Why Lithium Is Dangerous But PERFECT For Batteries

Our chemistry book has a diagram of a battery in the electrochemistry chapter, and I discuss that battery for a bit before explaining to my students that the basics of ACME (anode, cathode, metallic path, electrolyte) hold for every battery but that the engineering of modern lithium-ion batteries is far different from the diagram in the book.

This video - again leaning into the algorithm-rewarded longer and longer format - explains some battery basics involving the activity series, the history of the development of the lithium-ion battery, and the methods of fiery failure when the battery overheats.

This is, as Dr Derek says, a technology that has allowed our modern, battery-dependent world.

High demand and prices for lithium send mines into overdrive

Source - NPR article

We need lithium.

We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.

I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.

Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you had some students who would be helped by reading along - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine.

America's electric cars need lithium so badly it may wipe out this species

Source - Center for Biological Diversity

The challenge of balancing conservation versus commerce is ages old and not getting any simpler.

Whether it was the desires of companies to harvest timber in the Pacific Northwest running into conservationists attempts to protect the spotted owl in the 1990s or the more modern concerns of lithium miners who see the Nevada desert as a 'gold' mine running afoul of lovers of Tiehm's buckwheat which, according to a cnn.com article, "grows on 10 acres in... Southwest Nevada... and... can grow nowhere else in the world", the concerns are infinitely more complicated than they first appear.

The environmental side of me says that we need lithium. We need it because that's one of the keys to shifting from internal combustion to electric vehicles.

But is it worth the extinction of a single species to accomplish that?

Man, it's not my place to say, but it's not as easy a question as it might at appears to be to some on either side of the question.

(Update: As of October, Tiehm's buckwheat looks to be headed toward the endangered species list and all the protections that involves at the urging of the Center for Biological Diversity.)