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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 26 2020, @05:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-downside-to-the-upside dept.

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash:

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn't have a plan for dealing with that.

But we'll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don't cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

"If we don't mandate recycling, many of the modules will go to landfill," said Arizona State University solar researcher Meng Tao, who recently authored a review paper on recycling silicon solar panels, which comprise 95 percent of the solar market.

[...] "We believe the big blind spot in the US for recycling is that the cost far exceeds the revenue," Meng said. "It's on the order of a 10-to-1 ratio."

If a solar panel's more valuable components—namely, the silicon and silver—could be separated and purified efficiently, that could improve that cost-to-revenue ratio. A small number of dedicated solar PV recyclers are trying to do this.

Some PV researchers want to do even better than that. In another recent review paper, a team led by National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists calls for the development of new recycling processes in which all metals and minerals are recovered at high purity, with the goal of making recycling as economically viable and as environmentally beneficial as possible.

[...] In addition to developing better recycling methods, the solar industry should be thinking about how to repurpose panels whenever possible, since used solar panels are likely to fetch a higher price than the metals and minerals inside them (and since reuse generally requires less energy than recycling). As is the case with recycling, the EU is out in front on this: Through its Circular Business Models for the Solar Power Industry program, the European Commission is funding a range of demonstration projects showing how solar panels from rooftops and solar farms can be repurposed, including for powering ebike charging stations in Berlin and housing complexes in Belgium.

Journal Reference:
Meng Tao, Vasilis Fthenakis, Burcak Ebin, et al. Major challenges and opportunities in silicon solar module recycling, Progress in Photovoltaics: Research and Applications (DOI: 10.1002/pip.3316)


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:43PM (1 child)

    by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Wednesday August 26 2020, @09:43PM (#1042390)

    reprocessing spent nuclear fuel has been around for ages. They have been doing it in Europe for decades.

    The USA has a nuclear "waste" problem because of political resistance to reprocessing the fuel. Both proliferation issues and NIMBY have blocked efforts to start recycling the fuel.

    In fact only 3% of the "waste" currently being argued over is actually unusable in conventional reactors. The spent fuel from modern LWTR is composed of 96% U-238, which can be used to make more fuel rods. 1% is Pu-238, that can be used directly as fuel in most reactor designs. And the remaining 3% is a mix of fission byproducts that dampen the fission reaction by absorbing neutron and not undergoing fission themselves, they "poison" the reactor core and shut down the reactor.

    The biggest argument against reprocessing in the USA is that it is very easy to get very pure Pu-238 out of the process making it weasy to get wepons grade Pu from the result. A more recently developed reprocessing method gets around this by keeping the U, Pu, and other fertile elements mixed while managing to separate out just the neutron poisons. The resulting mixed fuel could be used directly in a properly designed reactor such as a CANDU rector.

    And even the 3% could be used for other things. While the isotopes in it generate a lot of hard radiation and heat, both of which could be used to generate electricity and heating in remote areas that solar and wind are not suited for. The reasons this is not already done is a combination of factors including the low efficiencies the systems would have and the fact that average people's cognitive functions shutdown at the word "nuclear".

    Solar and Wind are great where they work, but they do not work everywhere nor are they suited for all environments. Humanity needs to embrace ALL energy options if we are to continue to grow as a technological species.

    --
    "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
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  • (Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Wednesday August 26 2020, @10:38PM

    by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Wednesday August 26 2020, @10:38PM (#1042414)

    Off-by-one error. Pu-238 is worthless as fission reactor/bomb fuel. It is even considered a bomb poison for some bomb designs (causes predetonation, yeld loss and decay heat to deal with). Pu-238's only more or less mass use is in RTGs. It is Pu-239 that is both a reactor fuel and a bomb material.