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Posted by antidnan 10/22/2024

USGS uses machine learning to show large lithium potential in Arkansas(www.usgs.gov)
337 points | 222 commentspage 2
voidUpdate 10/23/2024|
> "the amount of lithium present would meet projected 2030 world demand for lithium in car batteries nine times over"

Does that mean the entire field has enough lithium for the requirements of 2030, 9 times? Or in other words, it can supply the lithium needs of car batteries from 2030 to 2039? That's not particularly long...

bitmasher9 10/23/2024|
Lithium is infinitely recyclable. We cannot really predict lithium demand in 2039, because technology changes much.

Look at steel. Most of the steel used is recycled steel, we don’t mine a lot of it any more. If you asked someone 90 years ago, they would have assumed global steel demand would continue to rise.

asdflkjvlkj 10/23/2024||
In the USA, most steel is recycled. Most of the rest of the world uses basic oxygen furnace by wide margin.
nodesocket 10/22/2024||
Time to buy some cheap land in southern Arkansas?
CHB0403085482 10/23/2024||
Lithium for everyone!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/21/business/energy-environme...

metadat 10/23/2024|
Wall-free: https://archive.today/59cJH
lovich 10/22/2024||
Oh, is this where the conspiracy theory about the government controlling hurricanes to wipe out the south so that they could get lithium came from?

If not that’s funny timing given that was a few weeks ago

__MatrixMan__ 10/22/2024||
Great, now ask the AI to engineer a fungal genome that'll help us purify it more easily: Frack in the substrate and spores, harvest fruit bodies on the surface, profit.
kylehotchkiss 10/22/2024||
This entire problem will solved without offering human employment in a place that would probably welcome it at this pace.
moffkalast 10/22/2024||
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
__MatrixMan__ 10/23/2024||
What are you worried about, zombies that want to eat your batteries?
moffkalast 10/23/2024||
Was thinking more about sink holes and the entire area caving in after much of the underground is destabilized and/or removed, but battery eating zombies would be worse.
__MatrixMan__ 10/24/2024||
Ideally we'd just be removing lithium and adding mycelium (mostly carbon) so the net mass removed would be near zero. The zombies though, yeah, that's a worry.

I assumed you were worried about GMO fungus wrecking the soil ecology or somesuch. Not an insignificant risk, but it's hard to believe that it could be worse than tiling the surface with evaporation ponds.

chromatin 10/22/2024||
Serious question:

Given the mood alerting properties of lithium, are people living here chiller than would be expected (controlling for instance for poverty / SES) ?

janice1999 10/22/2024||
Potentially. See "Lithium in drinking water linked with lower suicide rates" [1].

[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/lithium-in-drinking-water-linked-...

thesuitonym 10/22/2024|||
I would assume any positive effects are balanced out by living in Arkansas.
hinkley 10/22/2024|||
My only experience with Arkansas was waking up to a speeding ticket at 3 in the morning. Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?

But if it’s anything like Oklahoma…

rootusrootus 10/22/2024|||
I would have guessed better results in the 1am to 2am time slot, but 3am is not totally out of line. I bet the fraction of drivers at 3am that are drunk is much higher than at, say, 3pm.
hinkley 10/23/2024||
I think that is a socially damning statement about Arkansas if the drunks are still out driving at 3 am.
lightedman 10/23/2024||||
"Who puts out a speed trap at 3 in the fucking morning?"

Cops trying to catch drunks speeding home after the bars have closed. In the south, last call was 2:45AM where I served as a freshly-turned 21 year old.

hinkley 10/23/2024||
Good god.
dyauspitr 10/22/2024||||
Towns that make a living by ticketing people passing through.

The worst place in the world for this is Italy. Every time I go there they find some esoteric rule to ticket me for. This time in Padova, apparently I drove in an area where only locals are allowed to drive. Bunch of swindlers.

thinkindie 10/22/2024|||
Indeed in Italy there are area (mostly historical centres) where cities limit the influx of cars to keep it liveable and walkable, therefore only residents are allowed to bring their car in.
atq2119 10/23/2024|||
This is the kind of story that may say more about the story teller than the place it's about.

(I have driven in Italy as a foreigner several times without ever receiving a ticket.)

dyauspitr 10/23/2024||
Possibly but having extensively driven all over the rest of Europe without a ticket, I don’t think the fault is entirely mine.
tomrod 10/22/2024||||
Both areas can be great.
elpakal 10/22/2024||||
Um, why were you waking up while driving at 3 in the morning?
hinkley 10/22/2024|||
Some cars have seats for up to seven people, including the driver.
andrewinardeer 10/22/2024|||
Happened to me on Ambien.
hinkley 10/22/2024||
Hah! No I did my turn behind the wheel from 10-1 so nobody died on my watch. I was in the back.
Eumenes 10/23/2024|||
> waking up

you were sleeping and driving? lol

sizzzzlerz 10/22/2024||||
[flagged]
ethanwillis 10/22/2024||
I have to ask. Why would you say this?
edm0nd 10/22/2024||
You aint never been to Arkansas have ya? Its a meth joke.
snakeyjake 10/22/2024|||
People downvoted you to the point that your comment is grayed out and about to be hidden but there is hardly metric by which Arkansas is not in the bottom ten on a list of states.

Infant mortality rate? 3rd most deadly for babies.

Poverty rate? 7th poorest.

Homicide rate? 7th most dangerous.

Obesity rate? 3rd fattest.

Practically any map of any measurable statistic where states are colored red for "bad" and green for "good" Arkansas will be a deep, blood, red.

But it is rude to point that out.

silisili 10/22/2024|||
Here's another list -

Highest poverty rate?

Lowest literacy rate?

Last in opportunity?

8th worst in public safety?

If you guessed California, you'd be right.

Sweeping generalities and handpicked metrics do not tell an entire story.

snakeyjake 10/23/2024|||
>If you guessed California, you'd be right.

No I wouldn't.

California's poverty rate is lower than Arkansas', and California's literacy rate is higher five other states' (practically tied with Arkansas).

https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17826#P675e89693a5...

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/skillsmap/src/PDF/STATE.pd...

Also, I'm in California right now for work.

It suuuuuuuuuuuuucks. Places with billboards aren't my vibe and when every other one is an ad for a personal injury or drunk driving attorney the place is DEFINITELY not for me.

Still not as bad as Arkansas, though.

EB66 10/22/2024||||
You are citing the US News "best states" ranking. In that ranking, California is ranked #37 overall and Arkansas is ranked #47 overall. Even your own hand picked data source supports the OP...
silisili 10/22/2024|||
37th/50 isn't good. But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely). This same ranking puts states like South Dakota and Indiana ahead, which I'm sure many would object to all the same.

This is the second day in a row I've watched threads about Arkansas of all places devolve into these nasty generalities(yesterday's was about WalMart and Bentonville). I don't live in Arkansas or anything, but I think we as a community can do better than devolve into it over and over, unless the topic at hand was the problems of a state.

EB66 10/22/2024|||
I'm not saying that 37 out of 50 is good. I'm saying that 47 out of 50 is bad. Your data source doesn't refute the OPs argument that Arkansas is not a great place to live -- it actually supports the OP.
lightedman 10/23/2024|||
"But people never clamor on about how awful California is every time it's mentioned(well, rarely)."

Well, here's why it sucks, just so you can feel better.

1. the apartment rental industry is outright violating a court order that basically sets late fees and needs to outright face criminal charges. See Orozco v Casimiro

2. Ill-advised farmers up north are consuming tons of water on crops that make zero sense, and in many cases are growing crops that are basically exporting our scarce water overseas. Then they want to complain about a 'government-created dust bowl' when it's their own out of control water usage basically creating and exacerbating the situation. Oh and the desire to live in a floodplain, thus draining the largest lake in the state (if not landlocked lake in the country) and worsening drought conditions for the area for the past near-century.

3. OTHER STATES keep shipping their homeless here, thus drastically increasing our poverty numbers, artificially, and straining resources we don't really have thanks to ill-advised programs that do nothing to actually address anything.

4. Thanks to climate change, it's getting fucking HOT. Like, the heat you would normally only experience in the desert, is now a regular occurrence here in the valleys of SoCal. The deserts are actually cooler on occasion.

5. People can't drive and the cops do nothing even when it happens right in front of them. Oh, speaking of police, did you know many of them are in inter-department gangs? Yea, we just had to outlaw that.

6. Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.

7. Thanks to new law, fast food workers have a minimum wage over the state minimum wage. So many jobs which require high skill, like what I do in LASERs and LED lighting, get paid less than them (I'm lucky, where I work knows my worth) and it ends up being demoralizing. I'm betting it caused a small hit across a few sectors as people said "I'll pay the $30 to get a license that lets me make $20 an hour" meanwhile starting techs in my sector get $16, or $17 on a night shift differential.

Happy yet? I can keep going. Rabbit hole's deep af.

silisili 10/23/2024|||
Thanks, I think. But no, I didn't mean to pick on California as a bad state, I thought for some reason most people thought it was a nice state. I do, at least, despite its warts.

All I meant to say is that we can find many reasons every state is bad. But we shouldn't post them every time it's mentioned.

If Meta declared they were opening a huge new office in the bay, we'd get interesting discussion. If they announced they're opening it in Little Rock, we get little more than how awful AR is.

volkl48 10/23/2024|||
> Nobody's fixing the infrastructure. Sure new stuff is being built but that is supposed to be ON TOP of what we already have - and we're just letting what we already have crumble away. Yea internet and some power is going down but that's about it. Roadways, bridges, oh no. Route 66? It's screwed right now. Recent issues we had on the 40 forced a traffic reroute and the weight limit on those little bridges is 3 tons - guess what went over those bridges? Semi trucks with 10 or more tons of freight. You bet those bridges got wrecked, and nobody's fixing them. Ludlow to Cadiz is absolutely wrecked. Thankfully, I have an offroad vehicle and powerline roads exist, so I'm able to still get to digging areas or visit Dish Hill Volcano.

I feel like it's extremely misleading to give this example without providing surrounding context.

"Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today.

It's not very obvious at all that it makes sense to spend money replacing the 100+ timber bridges along the stretch rather than just abandoning most of the road/downgrading it to a 4WD road with no bridges - although repairing/rebuilding it does seem to be what San Bernadino County hopes to eventually do.

Many of the bridges, while partially failing due to age, are also failing due to flooding damage - which is what caused the 3 ton weight restrictions to go in place in the first place and the sections that have been closed since 2014/2017.

-------

Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population, and there's basically zero regional significance to the closure beyond mildly inconveniencing a few people in Amboy who can now only go West to get to I-40/civilization. (Especially since most reports I've seen suggest you can continue to the unpaved/rarely traveled Cadiz Rd anyway, which was the only connection that could only be accessed from the closed section).

The road from Ludlow to the Dish Hill Volcano is open, just less convenient if you used to get to it from the East.

Citation: https://dpw.sbcounty.gov/operations/road-closures/

lightedman 10/23/2024||
""Route 66" in this area is a 70 mile, parallel road to I-40 that serves a population of zero or nearly so and is a 2 lane strip of asphalt through the desert left over from before I-40 was constructed. It serves basically no function and no population, today."

From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.

"Additionally, the road is only officially closed east of Kelbaker Rd, and that section of road has zero population,"

The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist. I talk to the population there regularly before I go out to the Chambless skarn to dig. ditto the mining community that's there for the quarry at Kelbaker road (I own the uranium mine nearby.)

"The road to Dish Hill"

Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover. You have to come from Amboy's power line backroads.

volkl48 10/24/2024||
> From end to end, Route 66 spans 2,448 miles.

Great, but it's not contiguous. This stretch is about 70 miles long and merges back into I-40 at either end, and is the part of it we are talking about. What I said is accurate.

> The whole farm community in Cadiz would like to know they don't exist.

The farm in the middle of the desert that is a front for a decades-long attempt to loot and export the aquifer underneath it, regardless of the permanent damage it will cause, that one? That explicitly shouldn't exist.

It's also about 9 trailers and a house or two. And still has road access, as I noted and you appear to agree.

> Collapsed last weekend at the railroad track crossover.

Meaning the actual paved road to get to the area, or the unmaintained (unofficial?) path from the road, under the tracks, to the hill itself?

-------

But this is getting into the debate weeds. I'll be very generous and call the population along this stretch of road about 50 people.

There's close to 100 timber bridges in need of replacement, 70 miles of degrading asphalt, and of course - perpetual maintenance costs for both over the long term. It serves basically zero transportation function today.

I'm not a small government type, but the many, many millions of dollars it would cost to actually repair this road (not to mention continue to maintain it), do not seem remotely justified by it's utility.

The very tiny populations, tiny amount of industry, and very limited north-south function (Amboy Rd) here can be served by keeping the ~10mi Amboy-Chambless stretch and abandoning the rest of it/downgrading it to a 4WD track across the desert just like the dozens of other roads. Maintained/paved access via I-40 from Kelbaker Rd only.

-------

tl;dr - This is not, in my view, a case of government being unable to maintain infrastructure. This is a case where a large portion of the population would not feel that putting money into keeping this road in existence as a paved/2WD road along it's full length, is a worthwhile endeavor. You clearly have a vested interest in it.

bluedino 10/23/2024|||
When was the last time you heard someone clamoring to move to Nebraska or New Hampshire?
parsimo2010 10/22/2024|||
A large portion of the USA sees California as a place to avoid- so those sweeping generalities and those particular metrics might be accurate. California is only a nice place to live if you're rich, and most people are not.
Agree2468 10/22/2024||||
I think in terms of natural beauty, it's definitely in the upper half. Specifically Ouachita National Forest in my opinion.
Ancapistani 10/23/2024||||
Our unofficial state motto is "Thank God for Mississippi!"

If not for them, we'd be at the bottom of most of those lists. No one pays attention to the second-worst :)

nativeit 10/22/2024||||
People vote in good faith, I presume. Sometimes a comment’s factual basis matters less than its overall contribution to a productive and open discussion. Downvotes in this case are an example of HN’s surprisingly effective system for self-moderation working as it should. It isn’t vile enough to censor, but it also isn’t what a lot of readers come here for. It didn’t personally offend me (I didn’t vote either way), but I take occasional downvoting that I don’t fully agree with in stride, as the overall system seems to work better than most.
rootusrootus 10/22/2024|||
> But it is rude to point that out.

No, that is not rude at all. Making a flippant derogatory remark gets downvotes, people like to see numbers. Like the ones you just gave...

stevage 10/22/2024|||
Wow, that is super interesting.

I think I heard that long term usage of lithium has nasty side effects like damaging kidneys, but perhaps not at these very low concentrations.

coldbrewed 10/22/2024|||
My guess is that the presence of lithium in the groundwater is in trace amounts if at all, while the dosing of lithium is in the domain of ~300mg. A casual search for the quantity of lithium in brine from a mine shows a max of 1400ppm for a rich mine in Chile[1] so drinking straight brine wouldn't get you anywhere near the therapeutic dose. Good question!

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01691...

dmurray 10/22/2024||
1400 ppm is one part in 700, so you'd get your dose from one cup (250 ml) of that brine.

I agree it's not likely you'd get a measurable effect from the local groundwater.

pfdietz 10/22/2024|||
The formation is 7000 feet below the surface, if I understand correctly, so I don't think there would be any communication of its brine with potable groundwater.
mbreese 10/22/2024||
I would like to think that if there were any interaction between theses putative deposits to the groundwater that we wouldn't have needed an ML model to find these deposits in the first place!
jaxgeller 10/22/2024|||
El Dorado, one of the towns in AR that overlaps with the deposits, does have an above avg level of lithium water supply [1].

[1]: I'm working on a DB of water quality, https://www.cleartap.com/water-systems/AR0000550

no_wizard 10/22/2024|||
I am not a health researcher or anyting, but a quick googling seems to suggest its possible that it lowers risks of suicide[0] and other affective disorders, which by extension it would lower the rates of issues that can contribute to these issues I'd think.

That said, I honestly am unsure. It also is a requisite that it must be in the water in sufficient but low amounts

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32716281/

kranke155 10/22/2024||
It also shrinks your white matter I think, and has other gigantic bad effects.

Source: am bipolar and take 600mg daily.

astrange 10/22/2024||
It also causes obesity and may be the cause of American obesity in the South.

https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/08/02/a-chemical-hunger-p...

pfdietz 10/23/2024||
I wonder how much lithium leaches out of Corningware (made of lithium aluminum silicate glass ceramic), particularly when cooking acid foods. Probably not a huge amount.
AStonesThrow 10/22/2024|||
It may surprise you to learn that lithium is actually a toxic substance. No human being has ever suffered from a lithium deficiency. Lithium is not a natural or healthy component of anyone's diet.

So, the so-called therapeutic dose of lithium is merely a sub-toxic level, and must be monitored by frequent blood tests.

There are horrific side effects from using lithium in the long term, including convulsions, hair loss, diarrhea, suicidal and homicidal ideations, and extreme thirst (polydipsia).

So personally, I would rather not be tapping into lithium reserves for my health.

renewiltord 10/22/2024||
Only when Mercury is in retrograde
hiddencost 10/22/2024||
Love to see a project that uses bog standard ML techniques and doesn't call them AI. Respect.
janalsncm 10/22/2024||
When the tide goes out on the AI hype there’s going to be a lot of companies currently using expensive API calls for simple classification tasks that will be quietly revamped to use a simple CNN.

ML is a toolbox of methods. Not every problem needs a transformer.

cmrdporcupine 10/22/2024||
> Not every problem needs a transformer.

They do if they want to get the intention of a Venture Capitalist!

janalsncm 10/22/2024||
Venture Capitalist Attention Is All You Need!
driggs 10/22/2024|||
Quoth the article:

  The USGS predictive model provides the first estimate of total lithium present in Smackover Formation brines in southern Arkansas, using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence.
janalsncm 10/22/2024||
I was disappointed in that line. They could’ve mentioned it used a random forest, which is much more informative. “ML is a type of AI” isn’t even a cocktail party understanding of the topic.
textlapse 10/22/2024||
For a layperson, this is an accessible and directionally correct definition.

For the HN audience, of course this is 'technically incorrect'.

The article was written for the (larger) general public.

I am also glad they didn't squeeze in a word salad of LLMs and quantum technology and instead stuck to 'it's just standard ML'.

gowld 10/22/2024||
The only informational dividable from the statement is "we used a computer to analyze data".
ImHereToVote 10/22/2024|||
Nothing bog standard about contemporary ML. If anything calling it AI is underselling it.

This is what it was called back in the day. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02478259

bloopernova 10/22/2024|||
It's the new Hacking vs Cracking. Or calling any computer a PC.
gowld 10/22/2024||
In this case it's Fracking
strbean 10/22/2024|||
Are we getting to the critical point where we declassify a bunch of stuff as AI? Used to be expert systems were considered AI. Now anything-not-an-LLM is going to stop being AI?
lovich 10/22/2024||
That treadmills been going on for a long time. Didn’t OCR used to be classified as AI?
jpk 10/22/2024||
Yep, back when programming language syntax started trending toward more natural language, compiler development was considered AI research. Which makes sense, because in an era of assembly on punch cards, computers that could translate higher-level instructions that read more like English into machine code you used to have to write (or punch) by hand probably felt pretty intelligent.
Tagbert 10/22/2024|||
ML is one particular field in the overall area of AI.
nativeit 10/22/2024||
Isn’t it a critical component of everything currently sporting anything remotely close to a legit “AI” label? I wouldn’t call cows “one part of a broader beef ecosystem” for example. They’re fundamental to it.
bilsbie 10/22/2024|
Me thinks we might switch batteries to sodium in just a few years.
jandrese 10/22/2024||
I think there will be markets for many different chemistries and there's unlikely to be some total winner in the near future. Each chemistry has its own tradeoffs and use cases. Some will fade and die over time like Ni-Cad, but even that takes longer than you would expect.

It would be amazing for some low weight, low volume, high energy density, high discharge rate, high charge rate, cheaply manufactured from abundant materials, low thermal sensitivity, high thermal tolerance, low passive loss, non-explosive, high cycle count, low memory, shelf stable battery chemistry to appear, but thus far every one fails in several of the categories.

tln 10/23/2024||
Where does LFP fail? Today's LFP batteries are getting pretty damn good.
jandrese 10/23/2024||
Energy density, weight, cost, and discharge rate.
pfdietz 10/23/2024||
They're doing pretty well on cost compared to other Li-ion chemistries.
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