Despite the perception of solar panels as a “green” energy source, manufacturing them creates a whole lot of nasty waste materials - particularly cadmium & zinc. Cadmium sulfide & cadmium telluride are used almost exclusively in the semi-conductor layers of photo-voltaic solar cells.
Cadmium and zinc also have to be mined as ores and then refined to obtain the pure element. Cadmuim hazards are similar lead or mercury and it is highly toxic and thought to be a carcinogen. Zinc isn’t nearly as bad, but both metals are extreme fire hazards.
Thanks, UncleBeers. I have a couple of emails out to solar panel manufacturers and to an industry association asking about that, but I haven’t heard back from them.
Any info on how much waste is created per cell or per panel or something like that? So we can compare how much waste is created versus how much energy can be generated for both solar and nuclear power?
I dunno any exact measures, SnowBo. My information is anecdotal from a buddy who is a research chemist at this place - FirstSolar just up the road here. These guys are currently undertaking a plant expansion which will just about triple the size of their facility, so business (or at least the grants) must be good. Anyway, you might find some of the information you seek on that website.
And what I posted there shouldn’t necessarily be taken to be opposition to solar energy. Certainly the enviormental hazards are substantially surmountable as the technology and manufacturing processes mature; it’s just not there yet. In fact, FirstSolar, so I’m led to believe by the aforementioned buddy, is working on a method to take reclaimed solar panels, dump them fully assembled (or any in other condition) in a hopper at one end of a processor, and extract the raw materials to manufacture new panels at the other end. A process, which if successful and managed properly, would remove nearly all enviromental objections to solar energy.
Actually, the “intractable position” I garner from your posts is opposition to nuclear power. You’re against transporting it, yet if it is stored on site, you still oppose nuclear power. Yucca Mountain is unacceptable, but storing the waste near population centers is unappealing as well.
I am getting the feeling that pretty much nothing the nuclear industry does to address risks is going to be acceptable.
Not according to Garrish.
And your mention of the silica dust story is also rather overstated.
Silica, as you probably realize, is sand, and is not radioactive.
This seems to me another example of a sort of grasping at straws to discredit Yucca Mountain, like the “nuclear power is unsafe because the containers holding waste are not resistant enough to anti-tank missiles” thing.
I can’t get your World Socialist cite to load, and I am a little reluctant to take their word for anything. This is especially true, given that the accusations of an attorney hired by Nevada to argue against Yucca Mountain seem to be cited as gospel.
Here is a cite with links to a number of the official documents regarding the whole process of evaluating Yucca Mountain. The government has been studying the site since 1978, and seem to have done a rather thorough job.
As has been mentioned, there comes a time when NIMBY won’t cut it. If it is the best alternative, and the risks are lower than the alternatives, someone has to lose (to put it that way) for the benefit of everyone else. Yucca Mountain is out in the middle of nowhere, the water table is a thousand feet below the storage site, and I honestly don’t see how putting it in a safe spot for ten thousand years is “sweeping it under the carpet”.
As UncleBeer mentions, even solar power has real risks associated with it. For some reason, those risks seem to be glossed over, whereas nuclear power gets nitpicked beyond the point of reason with stuff like “what if you burn the container in a 1400 degree fire for six hours instead of thirty minutes? What if you hit it with a TOW missile? What about the fact that dust masks weren’t mandatory for a while during construction? What about the fact that one of the consultants didn’t date his e-mails correctly? What if terrorists hijacked a plane, crashed into a train, and stole a load of contaminated overalls?”
It’s like arguing with a defense attorney about a client who is sitting on death row. There simply isn’t going to be a point where the other side admits that all objections have been answered. If you see what I am saying.
…and many other requirements added to keep anyone from doing anything. The money wasn’t spent to identify a site, it was spent to give thbe appearance of doing something useful and is therefore irrelevant.
And it has nothing to do with deciding whether or not to use more nuclear power. There are many ways to deal with nuclear waste. The basic premise remains the same whether we use Yucca mountain or not: nuclear energy is safer and more healthful overall, all risks taken into account, than any other practical energy source we have.
Indeed; the conversation got pretty heated in a few placed. Hopefully the fallout won’t be too great.
Er… Is the area around Yucca mountain going to be that bad? My understanding was that the really high-level, long half-life waste that Yucca mountain is geared towards is storing spent reactor fuel. After reactor fuel has been cooled on-site in a pool, it is very radiocative, but most of the gamma emitting isotopes will have died off before its shipped. By the time it reaches Yucca mountain, it will be emitting primarily alpha radiation, which can’t even penetrate clothing.
So (and admittedly I’m no nuclear physicist so verification from someone more knowledgable would be good) in order to actually get sick at Yucca mountain 10,000 years from now, someone would have to break in to the tunnel, hike out to where the fuel is stored, break open the container, and somehow get the fuel inside their body by breathing dust, eating it, etc.
The concern, as I understand it, is that the area is (potentially) geologically unstable and that fissures in the rock extend down to the water table. Proponents point out that the table is more than a thousand feet below the Repository, flooding will not happen, and that the casks will be invulnerable to seepage and leaks in any case. However, the water table is at its current level owing to geologically recent depletion of the underlying aquifer; a wetter future climate may raise it sufficiently that leakage could be an issue, possibly depositing waste residues (which are not only radioactive but are also toxic heavy metals) into the water supply for the American Southwest and Mexico.
On the other hand, Yucca Mountain Repository is well inside the DoE Nevada Test Site and adjacent to (or perhaps somewhat inside) the USAF Nellis Range Complex. Plenty of atmospheric and underground nuclear texting has been conducted here along with current and future use of the area for testing conventional weapons. Confined and encapsulated nuclear waste is probably the least of environmental concerns given the amount of loose radioactives and toxic chemicals in and under the ground. Nonetheless, Nevadans (who were consistantly deceived about the hazards of nuclear testing) feel that they shouldn’t be serving as a further dumping ground for wastes, especially as they don’t host any plants themselves. (The claim that they don’t benefit from nuclear power is tenuous–power is bought and sold all over the country–but they feel, perhaps legitimately, like the homeowners in whose yard the customers of the bar across the street regularly park.)
We’ve had a history of assuming that we can just shove nasty stuff underground and it will just…disappear. The reality is not so simple or clean, and while some of the concerns of opponents of the YMR are exaggerated, it is also the case that the selection of Yucca Mountain was based upon least political resistance rather best technical solution. The best technical solution is, of course, to reprocess the waste into fuel…but nobody wants a reprocessing plant in their neighborhood, either.
I’ll talk to my buddy there and see if he can dig up anything, too. Might be interesting to see how different the information they make public is from what’s known internally.
That’s twice now that you have mis-stated my position. I never said that with on-site storage I still oppose nuclear power. I said I didn’t think I could whole-heartedly support it. Twice now you have failed to understand that statement. Let me try again, in the clearest possible terms: I am not opposed to storing nuclear waste on-site where it was created. I do not find the idea unappealing. I can remain guardedly neutral about nuclear power issues that will not affect me. Is that clear?
Re: Yucca emails
Garrish is not the author of the emails. He is an official with the DOE, the agency that is so desperately trying to use an unsuitable site. The agency he works for has lied in the past with regard to the same site. His words carry little weight.
What’s the term for bringing obfuscation and irrelevance into a debate? When did I or anyone else ever refer to silica as “radioactive”? What, exactly did I overstate? You’re just careening around at this point, hoping that something you say will sound good, aren’t you?
Silica is not sand. Sand is silica. Silica is the crystalline compund which is found in sand, quartz and a host of other minerals. And it is toxic when found in small enough particles, called fines. Here is a related news story from earlier this year.
That is what happened at Yucca Mountain. At least three people who worked at Yucca have been diagnosed with silicosis. At least one person is dead because of it. The director of the DOE, Margaret Cho, admits it happened. Perhaps you have some information that she does not? Please, share it with us.
Now you mis-quote me and make illogical inferences. Please show me where I wrote
Since I know, and anyone else who has been reading knows, that I did not make that statement, I have to ask yet again that you stop this tactic. It does not add to the debate.
And I’m not grasping at straws. I have shown facts, backed up by cite after cite. All you have shown is an ability to not see what you don’t want to see, not acknowledge any fact which does not confirm your already held position, and an inability to comprehend my words except as filtered through your own bias.
If you can’t get the World Socialist cite to load, how do you know that it cites as gospel the accusations made by an attorney from Nevada? You don’t know, you’re just making things up. In fact, the same quote I posted is contained in one of the other cites I listed, from the Reno Gazette Journal.
#1, Yucca Mountain is not a safe spot. #2, I’ll agree that NIMBY does not cut it. So stop saying it, and accept that the waste is going to have to stay where it is, in your backyard. (Not meaning Shodan’s backyard, actually, just that it should stay on-site where it was produced.)
I don’t see anywhere in this thread where anyone has glossed over those facts. We acknowledge that solar panel production creates hazardous wastes, but we also see that the waste is created once, and the power then keeps on generating. Unlike nuclear, or coal, where the very process of power generation continually generates waste.
Instead, what I see is that you ignored the information in his posts about how one company, FirstSolar, is taking a very proactive approach to develop technology that will allow the recycling and re-use of basic components in order to eliminate as much new manufacturing, and thus hazardous waste production, as possible.
In fact, in case after case where an argument of yours has been refuted in this thread, I can’t recall that you have acknowledged it.
Your last statement is one that I can hardly begin to answer, as it pre-supposes that you are right, and all that I am doing is failing to acknowledge that. The facts I’ve shown don’t support your assertion.
Stranger, thank you for so succinctly stating a lot of information.
UncleBeers, any information on the subject would be most welcome. At the moment I really don’t have any, and haven’t receieved a reply to my email yet.
I did not realize that a Walton was involved with FirstSolar! Color me surprised! :eek: I used to feel vaguely guilty about shopping at Wal-Mart due to their aggressive land clearing policies for new store locations. I guess now I can relax a bit about that.
Chalk me down to a pro-nuke stance. I don’t really see any other viable alternatives to be honest, not for realistic large scale power production (that is also environmentally sound…and of course actually exists and isn’t just pipe dreams). I just wish we could have thrown off the anti-nuke fanatics 20 years ago…that would be 20 years less environmental damage we’d be currently looking at. And if it takes us 20 more years to finally beat it through their thick skulls, thats 20 more years of damage from using fosil fuels.
Certainly there are risks and dangers involved with nuclear power…potential risks, potential dangers. But there are greater actual risks and dangers both to the environment and to every day health and safety in using fossil fuels today. Frankly I can’t see how anyone looking at this issue objectively, who weighs the real environmental impacts, the risks and dangers, can possibly be opposed to nuclear power. I certainly don’t see how anyone who claims to be an environmentalist can be opposed to its use. In fact, I would think environmentalists all over the world should be screaming for more nuclear plants, especially in the US and should have been screaming for it for years now.
Not really. Is the case that you are opposed to the expansion of nuclear power solely because of the risks you feel are associated with transporting it? If the risks are shown to be minimal, would you then become neutral (whatever you mean by that) as regards, nuclear power?
As I mentioned, the attorney hired by Nevada to argue against Yucca Mountain seems to be given much more weight, at least by you.
You didn’t. You presented the fact that mask use was optional for the first part of the construction of the Yucca Mountain site as (I thought) evidence that Yucca Mountain was a dangerous or unsuitable site.
Maybe you could show the relevance.
You produced a cite that seemed to be implying that, since a TOW missile can punch a soft-ball sized hole in a nuclear waste container, that this meant - well, something or other. If I minsunderstood you, I apologize. What exactly did you mean to say by providing the cite?
The Socialist site didn’t take it as gospel; you did.
The DOE disagrees with you. So does Congress.
See above. Consider also that the darn place is already in a nuclear testing site.
I and the DOE disagree. The risks of transport appear to be fairly slight (TOWs and six-hour fires notwithstanding). And simply insisting that nuclear waste stay on site multiplies the problem by 140. We can store it in one site, in the desert in Nevada, where we have already done a shit load of nuclear testing, and a hundred miles from the nearest large city, or we can store it in 140-some places. Are you prepared to argue that all 140 nuclear reactor sites are as secure as a thousand feet underground in the middle of a desert? I iimagine a good many of the storage pools are a good bit closer to the water table than that.
Well, sort of. Solar panels don’t last forever, and must be disposed of. Just like nuclear waste. And damaging to them can release the cadmium and zinc UncleBeer mentioned.
Which is not to say that nuclear power is always preferable, anymore than solar is always preferable. It has to do with the risks each poses, the amount of pollution produced over the entire life cycle of the unit, and the amount and reliability of the energy produced.
You can think of it as “going solar”. Or “coating every roof in America with toxic waste, in order to collect some energy, if it isn’t raining or cloudy or wintertime and you don’t live too far north”.
This is where you lose this part of the argument. Nothing is 100% safe. Even the deepest mine could be blown open by a meteor strike. All you can do is reduce the risk to an acceptable level.
As for disposal of the waste, I wish they would figure out a way of dumping the waste into a volcano with free-flowing lava, such as those in Hawaii, such that the waste gets buried and then melted by the lava.
As the earth splits apart from the killer meteor strike that impacted right on YM, the last dieing remnant of humanity in North America will probably be saying to themselves: “Damn, I sure hope I don’t die from radioactive exposure!! Why ow WHY did we ever put that nasty radioactive gunk there?!? And…well, I hope these tobacco stains on my teeth will come off using this new whitener!” "Yeah, I know what you mean. You know what sucks though? With the world ending I’ll never know how Lost comes out. And I’ll miss the new episode of Desparate Housewives!! :eek: "
But melting will not affect the radioactive nature of wastes at all. All you’d be doing is creating radioactive glass (suitable, no doubt, for Fiesta ware.)
Quartz you’re taking that comment out of context. That’s somewhat disingenuous. It was a reply to these statements:
I was pointing out, as you did, that nothing is 100% safe. Sam was arguing that the transport process was 100% safe. If he was not arguing that it was 100% safe, I think there are better terms than “impossible to rupture” and the unqualified “engineered not to fail”.
My understanding was that the really high-level, long half-life waste that Yucca mountain is geared towards is storing spent reactor fuel. After reactor fuel has been cooled on-site in a pool, it is very radiocative, but most of the gamma emitting isotopes will have died off before its shipped. By the time it reaches Yucca mountain, it will be emitting primarily alpha radiation, which can’t even penetrate clothing.
