As Nevada gears up for the next few years of its lithium boom, a new study is calling attention to what’s most at stake — water.

Lithium, used in electric vehicle batteries, is considered a critical mineral for the transition away from fossil fuels to more green sources of energy. Only one lithium mine is fully operational in the country, in the Silver Peak mountain range of Nevada’s Esmeralda County.

But that could change fast, as dozens of lithium mines are proposed throughout the state and a few make their way through strict, decadelong federal permitting processes.

Published this month, the study’s authors put Nevada’s lithium conundrum into a broader, international context, offering a deeper look into water that’s been used up in other countries and what the U.S. could stand to lose.

Environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers have all asked the question for years: How can Nevada minimize harm to its most precious resource?

“Tremendous quantities of water — as I call it — are being pumped and dumped,” said Kate Berry, a University of Nevada, Reno geography professor who worked on the study. “Nevada is known by Nevadans as a mining state, but I’m not sure everybody knows what the implications are.”

Open-pit, brine evaporation or DLE?

There are three known ways to extract lithium from the ground: open-pit mining, lithium brine evaporation and direct lithium extraction, or DLE.

Open-pit mining, which involves drilling large holes and the production of waste, leads to the most environmental harm and conflicts that have led to the killings of activists around the world, the authors wrote.

Lithium brine evaporation is the method where salty liquid is pumped from the ground. There’s no clear scientific consensus about how this technique interacts with groundwater, but brine is not renewable and takes millions of years to form.

DLE takes away the need for evaporation ponds. It’s an umbrella term for a suite of approaches that’s only been used in Argentina so far and does still use freshwater, sometimes more than lithium brine evaporation.

While three of the authors interviewed don’t see any method emerge as the most sustainable in every context, Nevada lawmakers have floated DLE as a potential path forward to use the least amount of water. Holding the title of the driest state in the nation has prompted concern about intense groundwater depletion in some rural counties.

“What might be a sustainable use of water in one location would very much not be in another,” said UNR doctoral student and study co-author Noel Vineyard, adding that regions studied see impacts from numerous mines that extract different minerals. “Ignoring that is how we end up with over-appropriated groundwater basins in Nevada.”

One open-pit case study explored in the paper is Albemarle’s contentious Thacker Pass mine near the Nevada-Oregon border, highlighting its expected use of 1.6 billion gallons of groundwater ever year over the mine’s anticipated 41-year life.

Though it got a green light in the end and is being constructed, the mine became a tribal issue, proposed on the site of an 1865 massacre with many worried about groundwater contamination.

In the study, lithium production is shown as an issue of environmental justice, which focuses on how the environmental burden of mining is distributed unequally to underserved people.

David Kreamer, a UNLV hydrology professor who wasn’t involved in the study, said he sees lithium as a parallel to uranium mining, where extractive mining has clashed with cultural sites and environmental resources.

He agrees that lithium production is an emerging issue for so-called frontline and fenceline communities.

“The U.S. has a history of polluting the poor,” Kreamer said. “Environmental justice is a really important aspect of how we go forward as a nation.”

Contact Alan at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X.

RENO: Nevada election officials verified enough signatures for Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign to appear on the Nevada ballot, the state’s top election official confirmed on Friday, likely bringing his insurgent quest to shake up Republican and Democratic dominance of US elections to a crucial battleground state. Kennedy has gained traction with a famous name and a loyal base, and he has the potential to do better than any independent presidential candidate in decades.
Strategists from both major parties fear he could tip the election against them, though a big blow to his campaign came when he did not qualify for the CNN debate in June. Instead, he held a separate event where he responded in real time to the questions that were posed to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
There still could be room for legal challenges. Last month, state and national Democrats filed a lawsuit challenging Kennedy Jr’s standing on the Nevada ballot as an independent because of his affiliation with political parties in other states.
The verified signatures came in a petition that Kennedy Jr’s campaign scrambled to submit after the Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar’s office clarified guidance that would likely nullify his original petition because he did not list a running mate.
The campaign had filed a lawsuit against Aguilar’s office over the state requirement that independent candidates must name their running mate by the time they start gathering signatures. The campaign said that they received approval in January from Aguilar’s office allowing them to collect the required number of signatures for a petition that did not list his vice presidential selection.
Aguilar’s office had said in a statement that they sent correct guidance to all independent candidates that had filed petitions for ballot access “well in advance of the deadline to submit signatures”.
Kennedy Jr picked California lawyer and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate in late March.
State and county election officials verified over 22,000 signatures on the new petition, well over the requirement of just over 10,000.

Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign submitted the required number of valid signatures in order to appear on Nevada’s ballot in November, the secretary of state’s office confirmed Friday.

Kennedy’s campaign in Nevada submitted more than 22,000 valid signatures to county clerks in early July in order to qualify as an independent presidential candidate.

In a notice sent Friday, the secretary of state’s office said that based on the examination conducted by county election officials, the office determined that the total number of signatures exceeds the number of valid signatures necessary to declare the petition for candidacy necessary.

The Kennedy campaign must next submit the names of the six primary and six alternate electors that would certify the election for Kennedy if he were to win.

Notice of Sufficiency of Petition for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Independent Candidate for United States Preside… by Jessica Hill on Scribd

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.