More Lithium Greenwashing in Nevada

Are a series of new lithium-battery projects in Nevada a disaster waiting to happen?

Fire at the Moss Landing power plant in Monterey, California on January 16th. Photo by GuyC, CCby2.0.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

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This piece was originally published yesterday in This is Reno, northern Nevada’s weekly.

Two major projects coming to northern Nevada pose significant threats to area residents.

Lyten’s planned $1 billion lithium-sulfur battery gigafactory planned near Lemmon Valley, and Redwood Materials’ planned battery storage facility near Fallon are both part of the emerging northern Nevada “lithium hub.”

And there is a risk of major accidents associated with both of these facilities.

In January, a major fire broke out at the Moss Landing battery energy storage plant in Monterey County, California. Pillars of flame engulfed the facility and toxic smoke billowed over the neighboring communities and farm fields as the batteries inside Vistra Energy’s power plant engaged in a “thermal runaway,” burning at over 1000 degrees. Local advocates estimate that upwards of 5,000 tons of toxic material was released into the local environment.

Thousands of local residents soon found themselves with breathing problems, headaches, sore throats, rashes, nausea, and digestive problems. Some weren’t allowed to return home for over a month. Toxins have been found in nearby soils and wetlands. According to the Monterey County’s Environmental Health Bureau, nearby “aquatic ecosystems remain largely devoid of life” after the fire. Those areas didn’t burn, but the fire killed them anyway.

In April, a massive fire broke out at the former Fenix battery recycling facility in Scotland, right in the middle of a residential area. This was the second major fire at the site; the first burned for four days.

What would happen if a fire like this took place at the Lyten facility, which is surrounded by residential communities, with Silver Knolls, Lemmon Valley, North Valleys, Sun Valley and Stead all nearby? Or in Fallon, next to the Lahontan Reservoir, which is the source of the community’s water supply? What if the chemicals planned to be used at these sites ends up contaminating our environment?

Either way, locals are not happy about either of these projects.

Global warming is a crisis. Reno is the fastest warming city in the country, with average annual temperatures increasing 7.8 degrees since 1970, when carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were 30 percent lower.

But is bulldozing more natural land, using more toxic chemicals, and building more massive industrial facilities really the answer?

The evidence shows that these lithium facilities are not “green.” As just one example, Lyten uses fracked natural gas to create one key ingredient, graphene, for its batteries.

Another key element, sulfur, will be purchased from oil refineries.

The likely source of Lyten’s sulphur.

The Lyten facility will also be mostly automated. That means few jobs.

Nevada is already home to the first Tesla/Panasonic lithium battery gigafactory, the United States’ only operating lithium mine at Silver Peak, the under-construction lithium mine at Thacker Pass, thousands of staked lithium deposits, several dozen lithium-related businesses, and the “Nevada Lithium Batteries and Other Electric Vehicle Materials” Regional Technology and Innovation Hub at the University of Nevada, Reno.

This is already having major costs for Nevada.

Around Albermarle’s Silver Peak lithium mine, groundwater is dropping drastically as the mine pumps nearly 4 billion gallons of water per year from deep aquifers. They plan to increase that amount to 6.5 billion gallons by the end of this year.

At Thacker Pass, the construction of a Lithium Nevada Corporation’s mine on top of a Native American Ancestral burial & sacred site and biodiverse sagebrush landscape has already begun, after they fought of lawsuits and protests from local ranchers, tribes, and grassroots environmentalists. Independent experts believe that the toxic tailings stack planned for Thacker Pass will be unstable, and the company’s own analysis shows the area’s water will be polluted for centuries.

Why should Nevada’s communities and wildlands be sacrificed so the rest of the world can drive Teslas?

If we want to solve global warming, we need to scale down and protect the environment — not keep bulldozing, mining, and building.

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