Having recently visited Reno and found it is in better shape than here, with a lot more operating businesses than here? Yes, I would move there. I like the desert. Thanks to new laws on Indian Casino gambling, Reno has less to offer that industry, and Vegas is newer, but also suffering thanks to the costs of fuel. Most gamblers would rather spend their money gambling, not getting there. What Reno offers is cheap housing with close access to the Eastern Sierra and Great Basin, which is very nice outdoors. Reno has a lot of bicyclists too, at least as many as Nevada City and I spotted a fair number of scooters operating too. Modern poverty, the New Poor, are mostly college graduates who put most of their wages into student loan payments, aren't addicted to drugs or living in slums in Oakland, and seems a lot happier than Old Poor. I'm sure they'll get run-down eventually, but the New Poor have every reason to start their own businesses in places like Reno where that's legal and there's few obstacles. This is a huge difference from California, which only really wants tourists to take out loans, spend the money, then leave, spending the rest of their lives miserable and trying to pay off the debt. In Nevada there is no zoning laws. You can do what you want with your land. Garbage dump? Machine shop? Horse ranch? Yep. Whatever. Placement of stuff in the area is a bit more random, but the economics are different and its a very freedom loving state, which doesn't explain why they kept electing a bigot to the Senate. Course, California elected a neurotic with PTSD to ours and her recent comments indicate senility just as badly as his. Perhaps if Nevada gets rid of the prick it would be worth it to move there.
Anyway, Sparks, a suburb of Reno on its east side, is a good location for the Tesla factory for some important reasons. Its got railroad access. It has major trucking interstates. The mine for the lithium they're going to make the batteries from is in Nevada, so its a lot cheaper to truck it there than to Texas or Detroit or whatever. The mine in question works by rain falling on a big basin of rocks, the lithium leaches out, then the water is pumped out of a well at the low spot in the basin, and the water then gets the lithium removed. Presumably to be sprayed across the square miles of rock again. Few non-geologists know this, but Nevada is full of volcanoes and has serious earthquakes just like California does. I seriously considered going to grad school at University of Nevada Reno for Vulcanology, mainly because its really interesting when mountains explode. My grim and dark humor funny bone tingles then.
See. Isn't that cool? The non-fiction section of the library has more fun stuff like this in the natural sciences section 550 ish. Also check in periodicals, though serious science papers on geology are either chemistry or environment articles in most cases. Chemistry at the small scale drives the large scale events like this eruption, which is mostly steam and carbon dioxide overcoming the ability of the rocks to contain the pressure. Geology classes makes this sort of thing a lot more dull. That is precisely why I opted not to study meteorology because I want clouds to remain pretty.
So I'm glad that Tesla is doing the sane thing and building a factory that's relatively close to the mine so they can retain control of their batteries and thus the price of the car, rather than be mocked for shipping the lithium to Germany and China for different stages of the process before shipping it back. All that shipping costs money, and its bad for the environment but the money is the important thing. You can't sell a cheap electric subcompact to the masses if you are putting most of the cost into the battery shipping around the world twice. This is better. So kudos for sanity.
Its going to take several years to build the factory and get things running before they hire anyone, but if you've ever wanted to work with lithium, which explodes on contact with water, you can certainly do so. Be sure to write up a will, and take extensive photos of your body to help the plastic surgeon if you happen to survive getting splashed and burned by it. You can even bicycle to work during the summer. Just understand that in the winter, they get some snow, and a lot of black ice so winter tires are a really good idea in that season. Upsides are lots of cheap houses from the boom are still sitting empty, and its a short trip to Tahoe and skiing if you like that sort of thing.
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