Look out Maine and New Hampshire, and North and South Carolina, they'll be comin' for your lithium when they come

 The Appalachian Mountains hold enough lithium to make 500 billion cellphones, researchers discover: Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the ancient Appalachians mountain system holds 2.5 million tons of the critical element lithium

 

... Mining these deposits would involve opening giant pits and destroying wildlife habitats, affecting the landscape and regional biodiversity. It would also create harmful pollution due to waste products such as fluids and finely ground rock that can leach trace elements into the ground and waterways. Additionally, the heavy machinery that would be required for hard-rock mining in the Appalachians would pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and extracting lithium from those rocks would involve toxic chemicals and more greenhouse gas emissions. 

Electric vehicle in South Korean underground parking spontaneously combusts, eight hour fire destroys vehicles, causes building evacuations for hundreds

 It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that hadn’t been charging. 

The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched a further 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish. ...

The country had already been on edge about battery-related fires, after a blaze at a lithium-battery factory in late June that killed nearly two dozen people. The Mercedes EV blaze, in the port city of Incheon, occurred last week. Then, on Tuesday, a Kia EV6 caught fire in a parking lot in a central South Korean town.

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