Um, delicious!!! Recovery of Highly Toxic Tellurium Used for Super Efficient Solar Cells.

The paper I'll discuss briefly in this post is this one: Adsorption and Recovery of Tellurium from Aqueous Solutions Using Calcined Mg–Al Layered Double Hydroxide Adsorbent Umama Rashid Lamiya, David J. Shoemaker, Xiaobo Lei, Samia Alam, William E. Holmes, Jonathan Raush, Mark E. Zappi, and Daniel Dianchen Gang Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2026 65 (11), 6196-6208.

I won't have much time to spend on this paper, but I thought some excerpts would be in order, since, as we have antinukes around here in praise of lead based perovskites for solar cells, being indifferent to issues in the toxicology of distributed pollutants, maybe we can add affection for tellurium to it.

From the introductory text:'

I added the bold for commentary. First off, the element is rarer than platinum, gold and silver. It's a good thing that the solar industry is trivial and useless form of energy, because if it weren't, and were to depend on an element rarer than these elements, well, one can draw one's conclusions about cost.

Of course, platinum, gold and silver are not toxic; they are inert elements, but we'll turn to that below. Cadmium, selenium, arsenic, indium and tellurium are not; they are all toxic, very toxic.

Even though the text, rare for the solar scam, uses a unit of energy, in this case the gigawatt-hour to describe solar energy - rare since most of the liars representing this junk as "green" use units of power (Watts) as if solar cells ever reached their peak power for more than a few minutes in a 24 hour period (this is rare) the comparison with coal is nonsense. Coal is the dirtiest of all energy sources, but the reason it remains a major source of primary energy is that it is reliable, something solar energy is not and never will be, owing to a widely reported phenomenon known as "night." Decades of toxic battery and idiotic hydrogen bullshit have not addressed this flaw, and never will.

The only form of primary energy that is more reliable than coal is nuclear energy. As I pointed out recently, the top 30 most reliable large scale power plants in the United States are all nuclear plants, the next most reliable plants are generally coal plants:

Sorted by capacity utilization, a list of the largest power plants in the United States.

Solar and wind plants are notoriously unreliable, which is why the cost of solar and wind energy - often misrepresented as "cheap" - is actually responsible for high electricity rates once the requirement for redundant plants is included, the LFSCOE as opposed to LCOE, the latter as inherently dishonest as the view that a Watt is the same as a Joule.

The only form of energy that is more reliable than coal is nuclear energy, which advocates of solar energy hate, having no interest whatsoever in the use of fossil fuels, about which they couldn't care less.

There is no "revolutionary change" connected with solar PV energy. It is a trivial form of energy; after the expenditure of trillion dollar sums on it, as of 2024, it produced just 9 Exajoules out of the 2024 worldwide energy demand of 654 Exajoules, actually growing by 1 Exajoule over 2023, slower than the growth of coal, gas and petroleum, about which, again, antinukes couldn't care less.

Both cadmium and tellurium are toxic elements, a point the paper makes with respect to tellurium:



Oh well then.

Tellurium is, I confess, a fission product. Roughly, over more than 70 years, about 80,000 tons of used nuclear fuel has been collected in the United States, still, for the next two years until China over takes it, the world's largest producer of nuclear energy. Of this, ignoring the zirconium cladding, about 95% represents unreacted uranium available for recovery and reuse, and about 1-2% is plutonium with traces of the higher actinides americium and curium, as well as traces of the lower actinide neptunium. Of the remaining fission products 3 to 4%, tellurium represents 1% meaning that all of the tellurium in valuable used nuclear fuel is at maximum, 80,000 X 0.04 X 0.01 = 32 tons, considerably shy of 78 million tons of solar waste. All of the radioactive isotopes of tellurium found in used nuclear fuel have short half-lives and tellurium isolated from used nuclear fuel a decade or so old will be perfectly suitable for use in say, thermoelectric devices localized in industrial settings, although I wouldn't recommend it as a consumer item.

The authors continue:



Don't worry, be happy. There are plenty of people around here to tell you that solar energy is "green" and that we should tear the shit out of vast tracts of wilderness to make industrial plants that will be electronic waste is about 25 years, assuming that stuff like this doesn't happen:

From Inside Climate News:




Virgin Group Company BMR Energy Announces Plans to Rebuild St. Thomas Solar Farm



Renew Economy:



Solar groups deny damage, pollution claims after Danas

(There's reference to denial again.)



Why the solar revolution is in grave danger—and how it can be saved



Um, delicious.

Have a nice weekend.