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Study Claims Discarded Solar Panels Create More Toxic Waste Than Nuclear Plants (nationalreview.com)
Templer421 shares an article from National Review:
A new study by Environmental Progress warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear-power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there's been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. "We talk a lot about the dangers of nuclear waste, but that waste is carefully monitored, regulated, and disposed of," says Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates for the use of nuclear energy. "But we had no idea there would be so many panels -- an enormous amount -- that could cause this much ecological damage." Solar panels are considered a form of toxic, hazardous electronic or "e-waste," and according to EP researchers Jemin Desai and Mark Nelson, scavengers in developing countries like India and China often "burn the e-waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled."
A spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association argues that the study is incorrect, and that in fact solar panels are "mainly made up of easy-to-recycle materials that can be successfully recovered and reused at the end of their useful life."
A spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association argues that the study is incorrect, and that in fact solar panels are "mainly made up of easy-to-recycle materials that can be successfully recovered and reused at the end of their useful life."
Huh, something distributed across a wide area for which proper recycling facilities may or may not exist is more problematic than something that is concentrated, isolated, and sealed off? Gee, next you'll be telling me that coal smog is also worse than nuclear.
Sarcasm aside, I don't think this is necessarily an argument against solar per se, so much as it is that we need to consider the whole life cycle, from mining and production to reprocessing, when it comes to solar. Nuclear gets so much scrutiny, while it seems like a lot of people assume that solar is without environmental cost. This is clearly not the case. In the rush to promote solar and wind over the nuclear power that we should have been running years ago (thanks for the climate change, you greenie assholes), it seems like the entirety of the systems are not often considered, like we do with nuclear.
The "300 times more toxic waste than nuclear power" requires considering one kilogram of solar panel as being toxic waste equivalent to one kilogram of spent reactor fuel. This is a preposterous comparison.
Furthermore it treats all solar panels as being as being the same source of hazard. Cadmium telluride panels are a special concern for disposal, but they are 2.5% of the global market and only used in special situations, whereas 95% of production is silicon panel and not toxic at all.
The disposal of solar panels is a valid concern that must be addressed, like the disposal of all electronics, and solid waste generally, but this framing is wildly deceptive.
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While solar panels do pollute a little if not properly disposed of, as far as I know, lead, cadmium and chromium are all pretty easy to recover by melting down the panels. If you are stupid enough to burn plastic, you get what you get, but as a kid we burned plastic from time to time and we didn't suffer any ill effects.
The problem with these articles is they assume the worst case for the disposal of panels while assuming the best case for nuclear waste. It is relatively trivial to recycle lead, cadmium and chromium into new solar panels, and they require no more than respirators and proper gloves and ventilation/filtration to work with, whereas spent nuclear fuel is quite difficult and dangerous to work with and there is no real east way to recycle spent nuclear waste. Alternatively, you could bury the worlds entire supply of solar panels in a landfill and it would be pretty harmless, assuming the landfill was modern and properly lined and isolated from the ground water (the lead, cadmium and other heavy metals are usually laminated between layers of glass, so even breaking the panels only exposes a small fraction of the total heavy metal content).
As first world societies, if we are really concerned for the environment, we should slap a recycle fee onto every panel sold and then require that they be recycled in a first world country with felony prison time for exporting un-recycled e-waste to the third world (we already do this more or less for many other things that need to be recycled).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Chalk up an own goal! Voyagers 1 and 2 are powered by RTGs, not solar panels. Nothing that is destined to operate much beyond Mars orbit is powered by solar panels. Inverse square law of solar radiation intensity and all.
And with that your credibility is gone. Thank you for playing the "I don't know what I'm talking about but will push my agenda anyway" game.
You seem very eager to believe a bullshit article.
Try Recyling Nuclear waste. The stupid article simply says 300 times as much toxic waste as a nuclear power energy unit. In what units? volume, molarity, mass, rads, toxicity, ease of neutralization?
the article is Right wing rubbish.
No it's not like there isn't a grain for truth to be gleaned here but such glib quantifications are . give away that this article itself is utter crap
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Which is precisely what this "study" does. Their graph simply compares cubic meters to cubic meters.
I put "study" in quotes because as far as I can tell there actually isn't a peer-reviewed study. Please correct me (with a link) if I'm mistaken.
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Wrong. Silicon plate panels, i.e., the ones nobody wants to purchase anymore because they're ungodly expensive in comparison to alternatives, degrade at 0.5-0.7% of power capacity per year.
Thin film panels, i.e., the ones everyone is currently buying due to cost advantages, degrade at 1-1.5% of power capacity per year.
After you've lost 20% of your capacity and can no longer satisfy your design load, you're not going to be happily touting how you can still get power out of your panels.
Who says? The NREL, based upon about 1700 data points (Fig. 2 of linked report).
Don't sell me bullshit either.
I hate to say it, but this is (1) not a "study"-- it's an opinion article, and
(2) the opinion expressed is unmitigated bullshit.
From the purported "study": "Solar panels contain toxic metals like lead, which can damage the nervous system, as well as chromium and cadmium, known carcinogens.
Notice that weasel word--materials "like" lead. Solar panels don't contain lead. Period. But the "study" didn't actually say they contained lead, did it? It said they contain materials "like" lead. What does that actually mean? Uh, I don't think it actually means anything whatsoever.
Likewise, solar panels don't contain chromium (you'd think this guy would go after cars, wouldn't he? They actually do use chromium.). And, while one type of panel does use cadmium (albeit in micron thicknesses)-- the vast majority of low cost solar panels sold are silicon solar cells, which do not contain cadmium.
Overall conclusion: this is not a "study," this is bullshit, pure and simple,
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Since you didn't spend more than two seconds on the topic, let's explore:
Are you against nuclear energy?
Are you against nonprofits?
Are you against nonprofits that advocate for nuclear energy?
Or is there a brain tumor that is causing you to spend no time thinking about an issue before commenting?
My guess - you stopped because your Facebook app let you know someone liked your post on Jello and you couldn't be bothered to read an article to advance your knowledge.
These kinds of studies are almost never peer reviewed. They don't explore scientific questions, all they do is accumulate a series of facts and present them. The important question is whether the data used is true, and peer review doesn't even attempt to answer that, it only looks for methodological errors in experiments, observations, or calculations. Pointing out that it isn't peer reviewed is meaningless, because you wouldn't expect it to be peer reviewed, any more than you'd expect this comment to be peer reviewed.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Nothing that is destined to operate much beyond Mars orbit is powered by solar panels.
Well, to be pedantic, Juno is a solar powered orbiter at Jupiter. The average distance to the sun for Mars is 1.5 AU, whereas it is 5.4 AU for Jupiter. But that's pushing the limits of the technology. There's an informative article on the topic from Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine. You can get a sense of the size of the panels from this video.
And in the absence of peer review, let's look to the poor monopolistic electric utility companies, who are the ostensible direct beneficiaries of the study, just like Kellogg and Post sponsored studies on sugar and carbohydrates.
Not many solar panels have been taken out of service, to start with, and more installed each and every day. They have a pretty long life, and so the pool of "spent" solar panels seems mysterious to me. Comparing them to nuclear waste, volume for volume, is designed to evoke horrors in those that believe that somehow, solar panels will kill for thousands of years, and they won't.
YES, e-waste needs great attention, but this is far more a hatchet job designed to slow down the implementation rate of solar panels. Do you smell the Koch Bros, AES, or Duke Energy in this one? I'm just not sure, only to follow the money.
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If we can extract lead and cadmium from rocks, then why not from old solar panels ?
I'm not an expert here, just taking an educated guess based on what I know of how semiconductors are made and a quick reading on how cadmium and similar metals are refined. The problem is that they are different chemical processes. Cadmium in the environment exists mostly attached to a sulfur atom. Cadmium in a PV cell is attached to tellurium. Separating the two would involve a different chemical process, one that no one has figured out how to do yet at a price lower than digging up from the ground.
Turning old PV cells into new PV cells is not trivial either since the stuff must be deposited down in layers. If the PV cells are just crushed and melted down then you get a mess. It's like taking a peanut butter sandwich, putting it in blender and trying to pick out the pieces of bread from the peanut butter to make another sandwich.
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This is a normal e-waste issue. The original post comparing it to nuclear waste is just badly reasoned sensationalism. The e-waste problem is easily solved. In fact it is much easier to solve than the energy supply problem that solar PV is attempting to address. The solution is to require recycling costs to be included in the purchase price. The cost of recycling silicon solar PV panels is a tiny fraction of the purchase price. (CdTe panels are a different issue...and maybe a bad idea because of the recycling problem just like nuclear power is a bad idea because of nuclear waste.) If suppliers have to include recycling costs in what they charge, then they will start making even more easily recyclable panels But including recycling costs in the purchase price requires planning 20 or 30 years into the future and writing careful regulations. Most governments around the world seem to be inept at planning and regulating, largely because many voters seem to believe that the future is not their problem. But no matter what governments do, I can assure you that coal and petrochemical pollution will still be a much bigger problem than unrecycled solar panels and even nuclear wastes for at least the next 100 or 200 years. The real problem is that these poorly reasoned articles confuse people and keep them from making the switch to renewable energy that humanity has to make it we intend to keep 7 to 10 billion people living with modern comforts on planet earth over the next 100 years.
The "bad" stuff is made of stuff we dug out of the ground and made into often unstable molecules to make the PV panels. When exposed to UV rays, moisture, and the glass or plastic is damaged (like from hail or an errant baseball) these unstable molecules can leach out. These molecules can leach into the water where it can be a cancer causing agent. Had it been left in the ground like it's been for billions of years, it's in a stable state from natural processes, it can harm no one.
Some PV panels are more likely to create these carcinogenic molecules than others. Those containing lead, cadmium, and arsenic are the most likely to create these compounds when left to the elements.
So, yes, "bad stuff" is created in these PV cells when they do not exist in the ground. This is not debated much, but what is debated is the rate these molecules are produced and leach into where it can harm people. If PV cells are produced in a quantity to where it can replace coal then it will be a problem. Just how much of a problem is something that no one is quite sure of, as far as I know anyway.
You can be snarky about the problem but that does not make it go away.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Everything about this is baffling. What makes them think solar panels contain even trace amounts of plastic apart from the wiring (which you wouldn't replace when you replace the panels)?
AFAIK, all real-world solar panels are basically doped silicon covered with glass. The plastic-coated solar cells are exclusively used in cheap solar calculators and maybe the rolled panels they use on satellites. Plastic-covered panels likely wouldn't survive a year in direct sunlight, and that's not even considering the efficiency losses from rain pock-marking the surface.
This is basically the scientific version of "fake news".
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