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Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production (newatlas.com)

submitted 4 months ago by mox@lemmy.sdf.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] roguetrick@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

can’t just push it back into the ocean because that increases the salt concentration in the ocean which is actually not great and when done at scale

Only locally, it's absolutely not a problem globally. That water will go back into the ocean soon enough. We're not generally putting wastewater in aquifers. The same is true of lithium. Both sodium and lithium form salts that dissolve in water, so over time their biggest concentration is in the water and that's why we refine it from salt flats.

I don't consider the refining of lithium to be a huge problem, other than the fact that it usually just means they're trucking a bunch of water to the desert for concentration and evaporation ponds (or worse, using the local groundwater in the desert instead of trucking in desalinated water like they should be).

To put it into perspective, high lithium brine and ore reserves contain about 14 million tons of lithium. Seawater contains over 2 trillion tons. We currently have a yearly consumption somewhere under 200 thousand tons. We won't be hitting a lithium resource crunch anytime soon, it'll just get more expensive. If we ever get hydrogen fusion running, we'd have to separate a bunch of lithium-6 which makes up under 5 percent of lithium.