Waste Produced By Making Solar Panels

If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016 and the wastes are stacked on football fields the nuclear waste would reach the height of the leaning tower of pisa 52 meters while the solar waste would reach the height of two mt.

Waste produced by making solar panels.

Solar panels contain lead cadmium and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. According to cancer biologist david h. The fact that cadmium can be washed out of solar modules by rainwater is increasingly a concern for local environmentalists like the concerned citizens of fawn lake in virginia where a 6 350 acre solar farm to partly power microsoft data centers is being proposed. Cadmium is a particular toxic waste problem.

Solar panels often contain lead cadmium and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. Silicon tetrachloride a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon is also highly toxic. Hazardous waste makes recycling solar panels necessary the question is when and how. It s projected that solar panel waste could reach 78 million metric tons by 2050 without a way to recycle that waste it means that much more trash in a landfill and there are some nasty toxins such as cadmium in solar panels that could cause problems we can t simply bury.

Approximately 90 of most pv modules are made up of glass. Nguyen phd toxic chemicals in solar panels include cadmium telluride copper indium selenide cadmium gallium di selenide copper indium gallium di selenide hexafluoroethane lead and polyvinyl fluoride. They also contain lead cadmium and other toxic even carcinogenic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel. Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.

Worse rainwater can wash many of these toxics out of the fragments of solar modules over time. According to an analysis by environmental progress solar panels create about 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear power plants. Solar photovoltaic panels whose operating life is 20 to 30 years lose productivity over time. Fabricating the panels requires caustic chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrofluoric acid and the process uses water as well as electricity the production of which emits greenhouse gases.