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IBM Recycles Waste CPU Wafers Into Solar Panels
Luyseyal writes "IBM has developed a process for scrubbing waste silicon wafers clean, allowing the otherwise highly secret waste to be sold. The silicon quality usually necessary for solar production is very high and the cost of solar panels reflects it. Recycling this waste should help bring down the cost in the long run and add a new profit vector for chip manufacturers. The article notes that IBM has such a high profile in the chip business that this recycling tech should spread rapidly."
But what am I going to use for pellet gun targets now?
Seriously, a 1x2, slotted to hold wafers, A-framed, and backstopped by a heavy tarp fed to a 55 gal drum is the most awesome way to dispose of scrap wafers ever. We generate about 100 a year at my site and they pile up in 5 gallon buckets waiting to be sent to scrap, I just like helping along the process...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
However, it would more impressive if someone can recycle the waste of LCD substrate. The LCD generates huge amount of waste as well.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
The AC said "As the 8th most common element (by mass) in the Universe. Do we really need to worry about recycling?"
And for this he/she was modded Troll. That the AC missed the point that recycling the CPU wafers is about not wasting the effort and energy that went into creating them and is not about the abundance of unrefined silicon is most likely a simple careless mistake and there is no evidence to the contrary. Assuming that it's a deliberate troll attempt and wasting mod points that could have been used to promote the responses that corrected it, in my mind, says more about the moderator who did this than about the AC who was factually wrong (for whatever reason).
Why am I bothering to write this, knowing I will probably be modded down? Because I have noticed a decline in the quality of judgment calls made by some moderators (certainly not all and not most of them) and it tends to express itself in this way. Meta-moderating is great and I gladly do it every time it comes up, but if I meta-mod something as "Unfair" it does nothing to explain why I thought so. Moderating isn't supposed to be about kicking ass, it's more of a small way that we can contribute to a site that we enjoy reading, posting, and yes even trolling in order to make it a better place, but that's true only so long as we have that intention behind it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Another way to calculate it is about 777.6Kj:Kg, which is 18.624Gj for the 8" wafer, in the range of what we ran down.
I left out the only 20% efficiency solar -> DC conversion factor, so the cells I described produce only about 50Gj in their lifetime, or 37% total energy inefficiency from manufacturing. Seems like a lot.
I'm not sure we'd have to put the silicon into space. I saw reports of a NASA demo a few years ago of a lunar robot making solar cells from lunar dust. There's about 20 trillion square meters of Moon facing the Sun at any time, getting about 1.3KW:m^2, or 26 petawatts. Even at 1% conversion/transmission/conversion efficiency, that's 260TW, or 17x total human energy consumption. Which means well under 6%, perhaps even 0.6%, of the Moon's surface would replace all Earth power generation. Of course, orbiting solar platforms could offer even larger energy return. And consider the amount of energy wasted on war and fuel distribution that could be saved. If the space "factories" are productive enough, the energy budget balances well in favor of doing it.
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make install -not war
Aren't there ways to get solar power without futzing with photovoltaics?
What sort of efficiency can we get out of focusing sunlight on water (using cheap Fresnel lenses), making steam, and using it to turn a turbine? Is this cheaper per watt of generating capacity to build?
Seems like if you did this on seawater (on a big barge or similar), you could extract the water once the steam recondensed and getting desalination for free. If desalination becomes necessary to supply freshwater this might be worth it.
I read on a book about a Germany based solar plate vendor produces their solar plates using the power generated from the solar plates they produced and installed outside their building. This is not a perfect solution. But better then totally rely on power generated from other not-green sources.
I've done better than visit a museum; I used to work at what was once Lucent Microelectronics in Allentown PA where, before they tore it down to make way for a ball stadium, they had wafer fabs and even a crystal growing installation onsite.
The best part of that job was signing up for being a chaperone for "Take your Daughter to Work Day" (it was still daughters only then) and herding the kids around to the different areas. We watched the ingots growing and being cut into wafers, polished, kerfed, and then later donned bunny suits to go into the clean rooms.
Way cool for someone who normally just spends his time driving a keyboard.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.