One of the minor advantages is that it is less poisonous than lead.
The poisonous nature of heavy metals is that, due to the electron structure, they are able to mimic other elements / compounds, well enough to displace the correct element, but not well enough to actually work correctly.
@Chronos’s reply reveals that scaling. Earth has a capacitance of 700~\mu\rm{F}, so you need 1013 eV by the end, scaling linearly with charge ejected.
Not too bad, then. Only 1e23 J. Spread out over a billion seconds (31 years), it’s just 1e14 W. Just 500,000 km^2 of solar panels at 200 W/m^2. The surface area of Earth is about 150,000,000 km^2, so there’s plenty of room. That pesky solar wind is going to be a problem, though.
I have not understood the reason why you want to get rid of the Van Allen belts: are you sure this would be a good idea?
I’m purely joking with my proposal above, but draining the Van Allen belts would be a good idea if it could be done inexpensively. It wouldn’t affect our protection from cosmic rays, etc. at all. It would just make travel through the belts safer.
I didn’t come up with the idea; it’s been bouncing around for decades. A usual proposal is to use long tethers:
Another is to use low-frequency radio waves:
The ideas are all somewhat speculative but they aren’t completely bonkers.
If it turns out to be a bad idea for some reason, we can just detonate a few nuclear weapons up there to refill the belts. We’ve done it before…
Ah, a joke, get it.
We (that is: you, plural you) have done a lot of stupid things in the past. I am sure we will do them in future too. Remember Project West Ford? It sure sounded like a good idea to someone.
Yes, that sounds promising.
An amusing coincidence:
I have a new proposal!
Yes, I saw that too. And you know another coincidence? It was 63 years ago yesterday. Here is another nice article about the event.
I’m an environmental engineer and a former chemistry teacher, and that is the most succinct explanation for why heavy metals are poisonous that I’ve ever heard. Kudos!
The typical explanation is none whatsoever: they just are [poisonous, that is].
The only thing I would add is that heavy metals are relatively rare, so there is little or no evolutionary pressure or selective advantage to being able to tolerate them, much less utilize them somehow.