I took the anticipated size of the Thacker Pass mine (including the mine itself as well as the disturbed areas from waste piles), and mapped it on top of a contour map of where I live to give me a better sense of the size of the area which will be destroyed by the mine. I recommend this exercise if you struggle to understand the area of immediate impacts of the mine (not including, of course, all the impacts related to noise, air pollution, ground water pollution and dewatering, climate change, general disturbance to habitat and wildlife, etc. that go far beyond the area of direct impact).
If you’d like to do this, you can use the following map from the Lithium Americas Scoping Report to estimate the size, which is what I did.
For people familiar with Mono Lake the area of the mine would reach from the western edge nearly to the eastern edge of the basin and cover half the lake with open pits, waste piles and buildings.
This is helpful. And it would also be educational to see actual pictures of existing lithium mines in NV and around the world.
Most lithium mines, like the ones in South America, are brine mines. I’ve been looking for pictures of hard rock lithium mines, like Thacker Pass would be should it get built and so far haven’t had too much luck. I know there are a bunch of hard rock lithium mines in Tibet; there are articles about the pollution from these Chinese-run mines, but so far photos are few and far between. I even spent far too much time on Google Earth trying to find them from space! 🙂 If you run into any photos of hard rock lithium mines let me know. I’m assuming they don’t look much different from any other open-pit hard rock mine for other ores like copper, silver, gold, etc.