I remember a discussion about nuclear weapons testing and there was a desire to detonate a few prototypes. When asked on why we'd need to detonate anything when the computer models showed the weapon worked the reply was simple, we need to verify the models.
We can model the PV cells all we like but we won't know the models are valid until we can verify therm with real data. Sometimes physics will surprise us.
I think this says something about climate models too.
You think we can "just" pass a law? One that would make solar power MORE expensive? That's going to happen, for sure.
Maybe I am over thinking this but I believe you didn't think about this enough. The solar power industry exists only because of government subsidy. Adding a tax would diminish this subsidy on an industry that is already on thin margins. These subsidies exist because powerful lobbies made them happen, getting a tax on solar panels is not something we "just" do.
Why are you repeating this nonsense about PV cells not being recyclable and being dangerous?
Because I just read the articles linked to from this website called Slashdot. Perhaps you've heard of it?
What exactly do you want to recycle from 300 year old atomic waste is beyond me btw...
Fissionable fuel like uranium and plutonium. After 300 years almost all the elements that produce heat and gamma will be gone. It'd be like a new fuel rod on it's own but with minimal processing it'd be a "super fuel".
science is just a mater of opinion! Everybody's voice counts!
Is that like how we should make policy because 99.7689278174956377596% of scientists agree that man made global warming is an imminent threat to the world population?
Why does it take so many people to prove catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is real? Should it not take just one? I'm pretty sure Albert Einstein said something to that effect concerning disproving his theories.
Compassion, empathy, and charity through the force of government is not a Christian value. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible somewhere, "give unto Caesar", vanity through obvious giving, and so on.
Separating Church and state has a long Christian tradition. Some failed on this obviously, the Church of England being an example but that's been downplayed in recent times.
For people to follow Christ is to encourage charity by example and with conversation, not through legislation. We cannot legislate people to heaven, but that seems to be what a lot of big government types think can be done, from both major political parties. That if people aren't charitable enough then the government must force charity from people with taxes and welfare.
Government welfare is not charity, it's vote buying.
Evil prospers when good men do nothing.
I agree. That does not mean "good men" should take from Peter to pay Paul.
And the problem with that is? I mean, unless you're a racist turd? Why not have the Muslim street "feel good"? Maybe less jihadis, maybe not, costs nothing.
Who's the racist turd here? I mean that if the Obama thinks that Muslims are so depressed about their past accomplishments that he needs to make it a government policy to "make them feel good" then is that not racism by low expectation? Isn't such a policy treating Muslims like children that need a pat on their head for a "good job" they did crapping in their own pants? I'd think that they should find it insulting.
Also, where in the NASA mandate are they supposed to do any outreach to a given community? Aren't they supposed to "benefit all" or something. I'm pretty sure it's in their motto. If anyone thinks that this kind of outreach won't just enrage them further need to look into their motivations. They want all nonbelievers to convert or be killed. An outstretched hand like this is just asking for it to be lopped off. I'm pretty sure it's a sign of weakness to them.
I'm old enough to remember ALLLLLLL the way back to the 2008 presidential debates. McCain talked about how we should be building nuclear power plants, as in actually building them, as in pouring concrete and stuff. Obama responded with a bunch of happy mouth noises about investigating nuclear energy and funding research or some bullshit. In 2012 the presidential debates were much the same with Obama making comments on loan guarantees for nuclear power and Romney talking about fixing the broken NRC regulations so we can have nuclear reactors go from proposals to breaking ground within 2 years.
Then we have the Obama administration dumping a bunch of federal money on Solyndra and other solar panel makers. That did not turn out so well by the way. Trump made a speech recently about how we should not have an energy policy where we wait for the sun to shine and the wind to blow.
The first new nuclear power plant built in the USA in forty years is in Republican controlled Georgia. At the same time you have Democrat controlled California passing all kinds of laws to get rid of nuclear and subsidize solar. The legal protections to solar power in California is so strong that we have neighbors ordering neighbors to cut down trees because they are shading their solar panels. Right, lets kill the plant life for our precious solar panels.
If you look at the Republican and Democrat party platform documents and search for things like "solar" and "nuclear" you will see just how much each party loves each. The word "nuclear" appears just once (last I checked) in the DNC platform and that is in reference to weapon proliferation. Republicans love their nuclear, it appears several times in their platform document.
It's the Democrats pushing solar. I don't think that they hate the planet. I just think that they hate Republicans, and if Republicans hate solar they they are just going to love them to (our) death.
So we have HuffPo that talks about how solar PV waste is a problem and to solve the problem we need more taxes, more subsidies, and we'll figure out how to recycle this stuff some day soon.
Then we have National Review that talks about how CO2 emissions are a problem. Before us are two solutions, nuclear power and solar PV, each with a waste problem. The waste problem is 300x larger for solar compared to nuclear so let's use nuclear. Or at least use nuclear until we figure out the solar waste problem.
Seems to me that National Review has a better grasp of the problem, it's CO2 production that is the real problem. The problem is not PV waste because we can choose to use something other than PV. I do agree that both articles can be argued to "distort the truth" by lying through omission but the National Review article gives a much larger view of the problem compared to HuffPo.
Have you considered the possibility that nuclear power is in fact the solution to the PV waste problem that HuffPo says we should be looking for?
Sure, when discussing the durability of solar panels one would expect an example that contained actual solar panels. We don't know how long solar panels will actually last because we have not been using them long enough to get good estimates. Claiming a potential operational lifespan of PV cells in the centuries cannot be backed with actual evidence.
What we do have a lot of data on is the life of a nuclear reactor because we've been doing that for over six decades. Claiming an operational life of 50 years is not too much since that is the operational life of many reactors today. Given the experience we have we can expect them to last 80 years. Not particularly because we want to operate them that long, but because without new electrical generation capacity to replace them we have to.
New designs with the ability to more easily replace wear parts, better materials, and a better understanding of the limits of materials under neutron bombardment, we can expect next generation reactors to last over 100 years with extreme safety.
What is amazing to me is that even though the number of reactors operating in the USA is decreasing the output has been increasing. With a combination of periodic upgrades, improved operational procedures, and the overbuilt designs from and abundance of caution, we've seen nuclear power output increase. Reactors built in the 1970s used to run at 80% design capacity but now regularly run at 120% design capacity. That is impressive.
I've seen comments complain that this is not a fair comparison since the study compared only the fuel burned to the PV panels that wore out. Given the large margin of the waste produced, the long life of the nuclear power plant, and how a large part of a nuclear power plant site can be reused, recycled, or repurposed, the study may be flawed but the conclusion does not change.
That would be true if PV panels were made only of silicon.
Silicon PV is not very efficient, but it is cheap. What is happening though is that other PV materials are getting cheaper and replacing silicon. These other PV systems are made of materials we don't understand as well. There is concern that if left out in the sun (imagine that, solar panels in the sun) the chemicals break down over time into carcinogenic materials that are water soluble. If not disposed of properly, such as just busted up into pieces and tossed in a landfill, the hazardous materials can leach into ground water.
Right now this is not much of a problem given the little use that non-silicon PV solar has now. If expanded at the rate some people claim it will in the near future then 25 years later we will have a very large pile of hazardous waste to deal with.
By comparison nuclear power is a much better known problem that we have a better handle on how to deal with in the future. Now is not the time for solar, but it is the time for more nuclear.
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.
Plutonium is not a radiation hazard. All the rules and regulations on it's handling is based on the premise it is a militarily valuable substance. Plutonium is regularly handled in a glove box, the heavy gloves and glass protect the body from what little alpha and beta radiation that it produces. There are people living today with plutonium in their bodies, so it's not much of a biological hazard but the glove box is common practice from an abundance of caution.
Polonium, on the other hand, is also an emitter of alpha and beta radiation but it's half life is very short. Depending on the isotope it is from seconds, to days, to years. It's safe in a glove box but if ingested or injected the alpha particles tear apart organs not built to handle it like skin is. This made it a popular means of assassination for a while. It was lethal even in small doses, relatively safe to handle, and would not produce symptoms until hours later. If the assassination attempt was to be aborted then it'd be flushed down a toilet were it would decay harmlessly (for humans anyway) in the sewers and be undetectable days later.
In nuclear waste you have long lived stuff, which is not a hazard beyond other heavy metals like lead, and short lived stuff, which decays away in about 300 years.
I remember reading an article years ago on how some linguists were working on a means to convey the dangers of nuclear waste buried for millennia, and to account for how language might change in that time. I later learned how this was just nonsense. Nuclear waste will be no more of a radiation hazard than common dirt in a few hundreds, or thousands on the top end, years in the ground. It will be contain heavy metals like lead but we have natural deposits of that already.
In my house I have a lot of electronics. If I were to have solar panels on my roof and tore them off and put them on a pile and then took all my electronics and put that on a pile the solar panel pile would be much larger. People don't have much to replace the electronics they use everyday and so we can't just exactly chose to not use them and keep our standard of living. We don't have to use solar power, we can use something else and still live like we do. This is especially true with access to nuclear power, it's as "green" as solar when comparing CO2 output, but far less waste to deal with in the end.
If we take the typical household with a new cellphone, computer, TV, and whatever else they buy in 25 years the pile of e-waste is likely pretty small, especially if the plastic, glass, and metal is removed and recycled. If you add to that a rooftop covered with solar panels then that is quite a pile, and a much larger portion of that pile is the difficult to recycle PV cells.
I will agree that the existing e-waste problem does need to be dealt with at some point. For now we can landfill it, ship it off to Ongo-Bongo, or whatever. It's quite possible we can do that indefinitely because we have a lot of places to pile up this junk and dig up new raw materials for new iDevices and TV sets. if we try to replace coal with solar instead of nuclear then this will become a problem very quickly unless we solve this problem of recycling it. Until we solve that problem we should develop nuclear power, and do so soon.
Wind is also an acceptable solution but it also has it's own recycling problems. The problem is less of hazardous materials but just mass. Each windmill has a large concrete anchor in the ground to keep it from blowing over and recycling concrete is not trivial either. Wind takes ten times the mass of concrete than nuclear with current technology to produce the same power. We can reduce the mass of concrete needed for nuclear with fourth generation nuclear but we don't have an equally simple solution to holding up a windmill.
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.
There are no fission products with a 5000 year half-life. There are short lived products and long lived products. The short lived stuff will be effectively gone in 300 years, and we know how to build structures (physical and political) to keep such things safe. Long lived products are not considered a radiation hazard, they are still heavy metals so gloves, goggles, and the like are still called for but this is nothing beyond what would be needed to recycle batteries and e-waste.
If done right the production of actinides, which has been a problem with solid fuel reactors, can be eliminated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
With fourth generation nuclear reactors we can create a sustainable energy infrastructure. After reading some recent news on the USA energy policy from Trump, Pence, and Perry we might just have that soon.
They also assume that nuclear technology will not advance. There are nuclear reactor designs being worked on that can "burn" the waste from previous reactors. These reactors can also produce plutonium-238, for more deep space probes like Voyager.
Solar? On Voyager? I can't even...
2) When they do stop working, it assumes they will be recycled, rather than land filled (not a guarantee), and that they will be recycled in the cheapest, most environmentally horrible method - burning. Yes, that is the most common method for ewaste, but we are more likely to bury than to recycle them
If it is not recycled then it is buried, either way we'd have a huge pile of stuff to deal with.
3) They compared it with nuclear rather than coal or petroleum.
Yes, they compare it with nuclear. This is because unlike a lot of environmental advocacy groups they offer solutions instead of just screaming about the problem. I've had the problem of pollution hammered into me since grade school, it's refreshing to hear people offering solutions.
ROHS compliance just means that if thrown in a hole the stuff won't leach hazardous chemicals into the ground. It does not mean it is recyclable. We'd still have to deal the the pile of trash PV creates.
With nuclear waste we can vitrify it keep it from leaching stuff and throw it in a hole for 300 years. After that we can dig it up and recycle the now radiologically inert elements. We might be able to toss PV cells in a hole and dig it up 300 years later after we figure out how to recycle it but that pile would be 300 times larger than the pile of nuclear stuff.
This just tells us that solar is not ready yet for wide deployment, but nuclear power is. Let's do nuclear now, while we keep working on the solar stuff. Maybe in 300 years solar will be competitive.
So a new iPhone every year produces less e-waste than my 8-year old Garmin GPS? I don't think so.
My 8 year old iPod Touch says you are an idiot for buying a new iDevice every year.
After I cracked the screen on my iPod, ran my old cell phone through the wash, and my Tom Tom died I finally decided to get an iPhone 7. I expect this to last nearly 8 years. This should not be too much to ask given how long my last iDevice lasted, I got a rubber case for it, and the screen is much stronger. If the waterproof claims are true it might even survive an accidental washing.
Oh, and when one of my alarm clocks died I started to use my iPhone to wake me. So with four devices replaced by one I'll be making no more e-waste even if I get a new iPhone every couple years.
(Yes, I said "one of" my alarm clocks. I'm a heavy sleeper and I'll set two alarm clocks about 15 minutes apart to make sure I wake up on time.)
If the study has even a hint of being true then it would seem to me that nuclear power advocacy is also advocacy for the environment. I like lobby groups that say "yes" once in a while. Those environmental groups that just go around saying no to nuclear (because the make BOMBS!), no to coal (OMG the SMOG!), no to windmills (think of the BIRDS!), no to burning wood (you can't chop down a TREE! they have feelings too!), or solar power far from the city centers where no one even knows they are there (the TURTLES! the desert turtles won't see the sun!). To many of them don't have solutions, only more screaming about problems.
Saving the environment is fine, so long as that includes people living int it. People are part of the environment and we need to find a balance with it. Part of that is finding energy so our soft pink (and increasingly large) bodies don't turn red in the sun, blue in the cold, get torn to pieces by predators, and get enough food to survive (which is not much of a problem it would seem).
I like seeing people that actually sat down to do some math to see what our impact on the environment is based on how we do things and finding ways to reduce the suck we create. I won't say reduce our impact on the environment because things like proper hunting and fishing means populations have grown. Improved farming and ranching means more food, more trees, and generally a greener world.
I said "hint of truth" at the beginning because even if they are off by two orders of magnitude then solar power still creates three times the waste as nuclear. This certainly sounds like something worthy of further study. This study also said nothing comparing the costs of nuclear to solar (which is approaching parity as time passes) or reliability (nuclear has 90+% availability, solar has about 30%).
E-waste has been a problem for a long time now which has only been addressed around the edges in the past few years. Manufacturers of cellphones, coffeepots, and on and on have caved to pressure from consumers and regulators and created products that use less lead, mercury, and other heavy metals but solar panels do not work without some heavy metals in them. The cases of these small electronics, household appliances, and more now usually have recyclable cases made of plastic, glass, and metal, but the silicon chips inside are a lot like those solar panels, they are made of difficult to recycle material.
If we intend to use PV solar then this e-waste problem is going to get large quickly. It's adding to the problem of small electronics many times over because the non-recyclable parts in a cell phone is small compared to the rest but with a solar panel the non-recyclable portion is large.
Perhaps the sunny side of this is if we can solve this PV recycle problem then maybe we solve the larger e-wast problem with it. One solution I like is pyro-processing, get the stuff hot enough that any dangerous chemicals get broken down to it's elements. The problem is finding something that can get hot enough. Turns out that molten salt nuclear reactors work great for this.
Rooftop solar is not a typical backup solution, but it can be. Rooftop solar and a battery pack, which is what the GPP said he had, is a backup solution. This is is fact what Tesla has been selling with their PowerWall systems, something that can keep the lights on in a power outage. Pair that PowerWall with solar and it can keep a person with lights and such indefinitely. It's not quite an off grid system yet since the costs would be prohibitive to be large enough to run air conditioners and large appliances.
Slashdot Mirror
The Voyager probes use RTGs for power, where the thermal power comes from Pu-238.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pu-238 from reactors here on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Please show me where my teachers gave me disinformation.
I remember a discussion about nuclear weapons testing and there was a desire to detonate a few prototypes. When asked on why we'd need to detonate anything when the computer models showed the weapon worked the reply was simple, we need to verify the models.
We can model the PV cells all we like but we won't know the models are valid until we can verify therm with real data. Sometimes physics will surprise us.
I think this says something about climate models too.
Just make it a legal requirement...
Stop right there.
You think we can "just" pass a law? One that would make solar power MORE expensive? That's going to happen, for sure.
Maybe I am over thinking this but I believe you didn't think about this enough. The solar power industry exists only because of government subsidy. Adding a tax would diminish this subsidy on an industry that is already on thin margins. These subsidies exist because powerful lobbies made them happen, getting a tax on solar panels is not something we "just" do.
Why are you repeating this nonsense about PV cells not being recyclable and being dangerous?
Because I just read the articles linked to from this website called Slashdot. Perhaps you've heard of it?
What exactly do you want to recycle from 300 year old atomic waste is beyond me btw ...
Fissionable fuel like uranium and plutonium. After 300 years almost all the elements that produce heat and gamma will be gone. It'd be like a new fuel rod on it's own but with minimal processing it'd be a "super fuel".
science is just a mater of opinion! Everybody's voice counts!
Is that like how we should make policy because 99.7689278174956377596% of scientists agree that man made global warming is an imminent threat to the world population?
Why does it take so many people to prove catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is real? Should it not take just one? I'm pretty sure Albert Einstein said something to that effect concerning disproving his theories.
Compassion, empathy, and charity through the force of government is not a Christian value. I'm pretty sure that's in the Bible somewhere, "give unto Caesar", vanity through obvious giving, and so on.
Separating Church and state has a long Christian tradition. Some failed on this obviously, the Church of England being an example but that's been downplayed in recent times.
For people to follow Christ is to encourage charity by example and with conversation, not through legislation. We cannot legislate people to heaven, but that seems to be what a lot of big government types think can be done, from both major political parties. That if people aren't charitable enough then the government must force charity from people with taxes and welfare.
Government welfare is not charity, it's vote buying.
Evil prospers when good men do nothing.
I agree. That does not mean "good men" should take from Peter to pay Paul.
And the problem with that is? I mean, unless you're a racist turd? Why not have the Muslim street "feel good"? Maybe less jihadis, maybe not, costs nothing.
Who's the racist turd here? I mean that if the Obama thinks that Muslims are so depressed about their past accomplishments that he needs to make it a government policy to "make them feel good" then is that not racism by low expectation? Isn't such a policy treating Muslims like children that need a pat on their head for a "good job" they did crapping in their own pants? I'd think that they should find it insulting.
Also, where in the NASA mandate are they supposed to do any outreach to a given community? Aren't they supposed to "benefit all" or something. I'm pretty sure it's in their motto. If anyone thinks that this kind of outreach won't just enrage them further need to look into their motivations. They want all nonbelievers to convert or be killed. An outstretched hand like this is just asking for it to be lopped off. I'm pretty sure it's a sign of weakness to them.
Sure, the Republicans are pro-solar.
I'm old enough to remember ALLLLLLL the way back to the 2008 presidential debates. McCain talked about how we should be building nuclear power plants, as in actually building them, as in pouring concrete and stuff. Obama responded with a bunch of happy mouth noises about investigating nuclear energy and funding research or some bullshit. In 2012 the presidential debates were much the same with Obama making comments on loan guarantees for nuclear power and Romney talking about fixing the broken NRC regulations so we can have nuclear reactors go from proposals to breaking ground within 2 years.
Then we have the Obama administration dumping a bunch of federal money on Solyndra and other solar panel makers. That did not turn out so well by the way. Trump made a speech recently about how we should not have an energy policy where we wait for the sun to shine and the wind to blow.
The first new nuclear power plant built in the USA in forty years is in Republican controlled Georgia. At the same time you have Democrat controlled California passing all kinds of laws to get rid of nuclear and subsidize solar. The legal protections to solar power in California is so strong that we have neighbors ordering neighbors to cut down trees because they are shading their solar panels. Right, lets kill the plant life for our precious solar panels.
If you look at the Republican and Democrat party platform documents and search for things like "solar" and "nuclear" you will see just how much each party loves each. The word "nuclear" appears just once (last I checked) in the DNC platform and that is in reference to weapon proliferation. Republicans love their nuclear, it appears several times in their platform document.
It's the Democrats pushing solar. I don't think that they hate the planet. I just think that they hate Republicans, and if Republicans hate solar they they are just going to love them to (our) death.
So we have HuffPo that talks about how solar PV waste is a problem and to solve the problem we need more taxes, more subsidies, and we'll figure out how to recycle this stuff some day soon.
Then we have National Review that talks about how CO2 emissions are a problem. Before us are two solutions, nuclear power and solar PV, each with a waste problem. The waste problem is 300x larger for solar compared to nuclear so let's use nuclear. Or at least use nuclear until we figure out the solar waste problem.
Seems to me that National Review has a better grasp of the problem, it's CO2 production that is the real problem. The problem is not PV waste because we can choose to use something other than PV. I do agree that both articles can be argued to "distort the truth" by lying through omission but the National Review article gives a much larger view of the problem compared to HuffPo.
Have you considered the possibility that nuclear power is in fact the solution to the PV waste problem that HuffPo says we should be looking for?
RoHS exempts photovoltaic panels.
I'm sure the oil and coal lobby is to blame.
Focus on the discussion, not the people.
Sure, when discussing the durability of solar panels one would expect an example that contained actual solar panels. We don't know how long solar panels will actually last because we have not been using them long enough to get good estimates. Claiming a potential operational lifespan of PV cells in the centuries cannot be backed with actual evidence.
What we do have a lot of data on is the life of a nuclear reactor because we've been doing that for over six decades. Claiming an operational life of 50 years is not too much since that is the operational life of many reactors today. Given the experience we have we can expect them to last 80 years. Not particularly because we want to operate them that long, but because without new electrical generation capacity to replace them we have to.
New designs with the ability to more easily replace wear parts, better materials, and a better understanding of the limits of materials under neutron bombardment, we can expect next generation reactors to last over 100 years with extreme safety.
What is amazing to me is that even though the number of reactors operating in the USA is decreasing the output has been increasing. With a combination of periodic upgrades, improved operational procedures, and the overbuilt designs from and abundance of caution, we've seen nuclear power output increase. Reactors built in the 1970s used to run at 80% design capacity but now regularly run at 120% design capacity. That is impressive.
I've seen comments complain that this is not a fair comparison since the study compared only the fuel burned to the PV panels that wore out. Given the large margin of the waste produced, the long life of the nuclear power plant, and how a large part of a nuclear power plant site can be reused, recycled, or repurposed, the study may be flawed but the conclusion does not change.
That would be true if PV panels were made only of silicon.
Silicon PV is not very efficient, but it is cheap. What is happening though is that other PV materials are getting cheaper and replacing silicon. These other PV systems are made of materials we don't understand as well. There is concern that if left out in the sun (imagine that, solar panels in the sun) the chemicals break down over time into carcinogenic materials that are water soluble. If not disposed of properly, such as just busted up into pieces and tossed in a landfill, the hazardous materials can leach into ground water.
Right now this is not much of a problem given the little use that non-silicon PV solar has now. If expanded at the rate some people claim it will in the near future then 25 years later we will have a very large pile of hazardous waste to deal with.
By comparison nuclear power is a much better known problem that we have a better handle on how to deal with in the future. Now is not the time for solar, but it is the time for more nuclear.
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.
The sun! It burns us! We must destroy it. But how? Let's poison it with nuclear waste. Right, my precious?
Gollum! Gollum!
Plutonium is not a radiation hazard. All the rules and regulations on it's handling is based on the premise it is a militarily valuable substance. Plutonium is regularly handled in a glove box, the heavy gloves and glass protect the body from what little alpha and beta radiation that it produces. There are people living today with plutonium in their bodies, so it's not much of a biological hazard but the glove box is common practice from an abundance of caution.
Polonium, on the other hand, is also an emitter of alpha and beta radiation but it's half life is very short. Depending on the isotope it is from seconds, to days, to years. It's safe in a glove box but if ingested or injected the alpha particles tear apart organs not built to handle it like skin is. This made it a popular means of assassination for a while. It was lethal even in small doses, relatively safe to handle, and would not produce symptoms until hours later. If the assassination attempt was to be aborted then it'd be flushed down a toilet were it would decay harmlessly (for humans anyway) in the sewers and be undetectable days later.
In nuclear waste you have long lived stuff, which is not a hazard beyond other heavy metals like lead, and short lived stuff, which decays away in about 300 years.
I remember reading an article years ago on how some linguists were working on a means to convey the dangers of nuclear waste buried for millennia, and to account for how language might change in that time. I later learned how this was just nonsense. Nuclear waste will be no more of a radiation hazard than common dirt in a few hundreds, or thousands on the top end, years in the ground. It will be contain heavy metals like lead but we have natural deposits of that already.
There is no need to single out solar panels.
I'll respectfully disagree, and I'll explain.
In my house I have a lot of electronics. If I were to have solar panels on my roof and tore them off and put them on a pile and then took all my electronics and put that on a pile the solar panel pile would be much larger. People don't have much to replace the electronics they use everyday and so we can't just exactly chose to not use them and keep our standard of living. We don't have to use solar power, we can use something else and still live like we do. This is especially true with access to nuclear power, it's as "green" as solar when comparing CO2 output, but far less waste to deal with in the end.
If we take the typical household with a new cellphone, computer, TV, and whatever else they buy in 25 years the pile of e-waste is likely pretty small, especially if the plastic, glass, and metal is removed and recycled. If you add to that a rooftop covered with solar panels then that is quite a pile, and a much larger portion of that pile is the difficult to recycle PV cells.
I will agree that the existing e-waste problem does need to be dealt with at some point. For now we can landfill it, ship it off to Ongo-Bongo, or whatever. It's quite possible we can do that indefinitely because we have a lot of places to pile up this junk and dig up new raw materials for new iDevices and TV sets. if we try to replace coal with solar instead of nuclear then this will become a problem very quickly unless we solve this problem of recycling it. Until we solve that problem we should develop nuclear power, and do so soon.
Wind is also an acceptable solution but it also has it's own recycling problems. The problem is less of hazardous materials but just mass. Each windmill has a large concrete anchor in the ground to keep it from blowing over and recycling concrete is not trivial either. Wind takes ten times the mass of concrete than nuclear with current technology to produce the same power. We can reduce the mass of concrete needed for nuclear with fourth generation nuclear but we don't have an equally simple solution to holding up a windmill.
Would you prefer it if you read about this problem on HuffPo?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
That's an article from 2014, so this is not new or the rantings of only "right wing nutjobs".
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.
This is a far cry from a 5000 year half-life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are no fission products with a 5000 year half-life. There are short lived products and long lived products. The short lived stuff will be effectively gone in 300 years, and we know how to build structures (physical and political) to keep such things safe. Long lived products are not considered a radiation hazard, they are still heavy metals so gloves, goggles, and the like are still called for but this is nothing beyond what would be needed to recycle batteries and e-waste.
If done right the production of actinides, which has been a problem with solid fuel reactors, can be eliminated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
With fourth generation nuclear reactors we can create a sustainable energy infrastructure. After reading some recent news on the USA energy policy from Trump, Pence, and Perry we might just have that soon.
1) Assumes they have a really short lifespan.
Voyager? Go read a book.
They also assume that nuclear technology will not advance. There are nuclear reactor designs being worked on that can "burn" the waste from previous reactors. These reactors can also produce plutonium-238, for more deep space probes like Voyager.
Solar? On Voyager? I can't even...
2) When they do stop working, it assumes they will be recycled, rather than land filled (not a guarantee), and that they will be recycled in the cheapest, most environmentally horrible method - burning. Yes, that is the most common method for ewaste, but we are more likely to bury than to recycle them
If it is not recycled then it is buried, either way we'd have a huge pile of stuff to deal with.
3) They compared it with nuclear rather than coal or petroleum.
Yes, they compare it with nuclear. This is because unlike a lot of environmental advocacy groups they offer solutions instead of just screaming about the problem. I've had the problem of pollution hammered into me since grade school, it's refreshing to hear people offering solutions.
Don't sell me bullshit and expect me to eat it.
Voyager?
ROHS compliance just means that if thrown in a hole the stuff won't leach hazardous chemicals into the ground. It does not mean it is recyclable. We'd still have to deal the the pile of trash PV creates.
With nuclear waste we can vitrify it keep it from leaching stuff and throw it in a hole for 300 years. After that we can dig it up and recycle the now radiologically inert elements. We might be able to toss PV cells in a hole and dig it up 300 years later after we figure out how to recycle it but that pile would be 300 times larger than the pile of nuclear stuff.
This just tells us that solar is not ready yet for wide deployment, but nuclear power is. Let's do nuclear now, while we keep working on the solar stuff. Maybe in 300 years solar will be competitive.
So a new iPhone every year produces less e-waste than my 8-year old Garmin GPS?
I don't think so.
My 8 year old iPod Touch says you are an idiot for buying a new iDevice every year.
After I cracked the screen on my iPod, ran my old cell phone through the wash, and my Tom Tom died I finally decided to get an iPhone 7. I expect this to last nearly 8 years. This should not be too much to ask given how long my last iDevice lasted, I got a rubber case for it, and the screen is much stronger. If the waterproof claims are true it might even survive an accidental washing.
Oh, and when one of my alarm clocks died I started to use my iPhone to wake me. So with four devices replaced by one I'll be making no more e-waste even if I get a new iPhone every couple years.
(Yes, I said "one of" my alarm clocks. I'm a heavy sleeper and I'll set two alarm clocks about 15 minutes apart to make sure I wake up on time.)
If the study has even a hint of being true then it would seem to me that nuclear power advocacy is also advocacy for the environment. I like lobby groups that say "yes" once in a while. Those environmental groups that just go around saying no to nuclear (because the make BOMBS!), no to coal (OMG the SMOG!), no to windmills (think of the BIRDS!), no to burning wood (you can't chop down a TREE! they have feelings too!), or solar power far from the city centers where no one even knows they are there (the TURTLES! the desert turtles won't see the sun!). To many of them don't have solutions, only more screaming about problems.
Saving the environment is fine, so long as that includes people living int it. People are part of the environment and we need to find a balance with it. Part of that is finding energy so our soft pink (and increasingly large) bodies don't turn red in the sun, blue in the cold, get torn to pieces by predators, and get enough food to survive (which is not much of a problem it would seem).
I like seeing people that actually sat down to do some math to see what our impact on the environment is based on how we do things and finding ways to reduce the suck we create. I won't say reduce our impact on the environment because things like proper hunting and fishing means populations have grown. Improved farming and ranching means more food, more trees, and generally a greener world.
I said "hint of truth" at the beginning because even if they are off by two orders of magnitude then solar power still creates three times the waste as nuclear. This certainly sounds like something worthy of further study. This study also said nothing comparing the costs of nuclear to solar (which is approaching parity as time passes) or reliability (nuclear has 90+% availability, solar has about 30%).
It's both and more.
E-waste has been a problem for a long time now which has only been addressed around the edges in the past few years. Manufacturers of cellphones, coffeepots, and on and on have caved to pressure from consumers and regulators and created products that use less lead, mercury, and other heavy metals but solar panels do not work without some heavy metals in them. The cases of these small electronics, household appliances, and more now usually have recyclable cases made of plastic, glass, and metal, but the silicon chips inside are a lot like those solar panels, they are made of difficult to recycle material.
If we intend to use PV solar then this e-waste problem is going to get large quickly. It's adding to the problem of small electronics many times over because the non-recyclable parts in a cell phone is small compared to the rest but with a solar panel the non-recyclable portion is large.
Perhaps the sunny side of this is if we can solve this PV recycle problem then maybe we solve the larger e-wast problem with it. One solution I like is pyro-processing, get the stuff hot enough that any dangerous chemicals get broken down to it's elements. The problem is finding something that can get hot enough. Turns out that molten salt nuclear reactors work great for this.
Rooftop solar is not a typical backup solution, but it can be. Rooftop solar and a battery pack, which is what the GPP said he had, is a backup solution. This is is fact what Tesla has been selling with their PowerWall systems, something that can keep the lights on in a power outage. Pair that PowerWall with solar and it can keep a person with lights and such indefinitely. It's not quite an off grid system yet since the costs would be prohibitive to be large enough to run air conditioners and large appliances.