<Queensland Shale Oil Billions in The Balance ?The Oil DrumDrumBeat: December 3, 2007>

106 comments on The Fort Collins Dilemma

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pondlife on December 3, 2007 - 4:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Can you be more specific? Gilgamesh's summary is exactly what I would think.

I don't work in PV production but I did do an EE degree in 94 so I have some knowledge.

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praetzel on December 3, 2007 - 8:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

They're both correct.
Lick the panels all you like - that's safe.
However, at the mfg side you're talking much higher concentrations of really nasty stuff to get diffusion (via high temperature) into the bulk material. If you want to work in a fab plant you've got to be paranoid about everything - leaks can kill you before you could smell or see anything. Using the final product though is a different story except for getting stabbed by pins on an IC.

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pondlife on December 3, 2007 - 9:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Then why stop at Cadmium? Electronics is stuffed full of nasty things [at the manufacturing + assembly stage] I dont think you would want Arsenic, Berylium, Gallium, Telurium, Germanium, Phosphorus, Mercury, Americurium, Tantalum, Phosgene, Thorium, CFCs, nastystuffium etc in your Coffee. This issue needed resolving 80 years ago.

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Gilgamesh on December 3, 2007 - 12:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

ya im an engg too, to purify the waste water stream we need gov costs for different pollutions and the toxicologists to tell us what purification method to use (chemical precipitation, RO, UF, MF, centrifugation, electrodepositation, ion exchange) these processess all require energy, and it is probable that the specific efficiency of solar panels would allow for said filtering.

This is where toxicology comes in to play, we need to know the LOEL and NOEL's for the chemicals to determine economic responses.

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Tom Womack on December 4, 2007 - 10:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I'd happily stir my coffee with a tantalum spoon; the metal is unreactive enough that it's used in medical implants. Also hard enough and refractory enough that making a spoon out of it would be an interesting and quite expensive exercise.

Oliver Sacks has been known to offer guests a gallium spoon for their coffee - gallium melts at about 37C, so the spoon ends up as a little pool at the bottom of the mug - which suggests gallium is not horribly toxic.

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slinky on December 6, 2007 - 7:54am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I'll spell it out for you...these panels are not just CdTe...they're a combo of Cad Tel, Cad sulfide, and Cad Chloride, lick away my friend, you owe me 1000.00

Jeff

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slinky on December 6, 2007 - 11:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Cadmium is Cadmium. Heat it up...cool it down it's still cad.

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