Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - 109 Comments

Mike Moffatt considers how much it would cost to increase the lithium levels in drinking water, and how much might be gained as a result.

The city of Toronto has 3.3 murders/100,000 people (Source). A 30% reduction in this rate would lower it by 1 murder per year per 100,000 people. If our rough back-of-the-envelope calculations are correct and the lithium carbonate method works like the Texas study suggests, $153,000 buys us one less murder. That does not take into account the reductions in rapes, suicides, drug use or thefts.

Will it work? I don’t know. It seems like it would be worthy a pilot study or two. Although those levels of elemental lithium are believed to be safe, there may be side-effects we are not considering. There are ethical considerations as well, but it is hard to make a case that adding fluoride to the water supply is ethical but lithium is not – and we’ve been adding fluoride to drinking water for over half a century.

Will electric cars ignite a lithium boom?

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 1:41 PM - 19 Comments

Some suggest the lithium supply could eventually be tighter than oil is today

During last year’s American presidential campaign, John McCain laid out his plan to jump-start the electric car industry with a US$300-million reward for whomever could build a better battery. His then rival, Barack Obama, roundly mocked the scheme, calling it a “gimmick.” But it turns out that Obama’s biggest problem with the plan may have been there weren’t enough zeros in the prize.

Any day now, the U.S. Department of Energy is expected to announce the winning recipients of grants to foster a domestic automotive battery industry, and this time the pot is worth US$2.4-billion. Washington has already handed out US$8 billion in loans to Ford, Tesla and Nissan to promote cleaner vehicles—which the latter plans to tap to build an automotive battery plant in Tennessee. And just last week Ontario jumped in to pledge incentives of as much as $10,000 per car to lure drivers into buying electrics. Continue…