Solar PV Panels Unsustainable & Can Cause Cancer

[ThisDinosaur]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshe ... 76cdab121c

A few months of rainwater can rinse the carcinogenic Cadmium out of your rooftop PV panels and into your lawn, garden, groundwater.

Also, there's no known economical way to recycle panels. So there's another post-peak-oil, finite resource, energy crisis on the distant horizon.

Our species was really spoiled with this whole electricity thing for a few centuries.

[Kriegsspiel]

Luckily fusion is on the near horizon, only 30 more years!

[C40]

Well, I guess all the bad chemicals leaked out of my solar panels a couple years ago and now they are good and clean.... Right??

[2Birds1Stone]

Clean as a whistle!

[fell-like-rain]

It says lead and cadmium can be washed out of the fragments of solar modules. So only if your panels got trashed by a major storm or something. And all it says is 'carcinogenic'. Coffee is carcinogenic. Without any info about exposure levels or the genotoxicity of cadmium, it's pretty irresponsible to claim solar panels can give you cancer- the waste problem is real, but there's no need to be alarmist.

[ThisDinosaur]

Clean as a whistle!

Where can I find the rest of that set? Was it recorded?

Derailed already...

[ThisDinosaur]

@fell-like-rain
True. But if you live in a sunny, hurricane-prone area, you will likely end up with broken panels at some point.

[Lucky C]

This is a big misunderstanding. As fell-like-rain says the toxic elements would be contained within the panels unless destroyed. They are not washing onto our lawns and gardens.

Solar panels often contain lead, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals that cannot be removed without breaking apart the entire panel.

So your property is safe from contamination unless you or the Mother Nature break apart your solar panels.

Even if they're unsustainable, surely they can help us transition as a more appealing alternative to a fast crash Mad Max scenario. They also have the whole small-scale and off-grid appeal, while wind turbines keep getting bigger with specialized tech and technicians required to make and maintain them - hard to keep a 500 ft turbine going if the system collapses vs. rooftop solar systems. Hopefully there will be a good recycling solution in the near future.

[7Wannabe5]

https://www.instructables.com/id/homema ... old-items/