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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

In case you want more than a press release:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell

N.b the long section on lead toxicity concerns.

In my previous comment elsewhere that got flagged, I said, among other things, that the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water.

Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment. Even the silicon panels contain lead.

There's a pretty dark side to renewables that not many want to see.

https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...

> the only clean sources of energy are nuclear and water

> Solar panels are generally pretty toxic to the environment

Nuclear waste is famously clean and Three Gorges Dam has caused the Earth to alter its rotation.

Lunch is not free and never will be free. Part of the problem is pretending that it is or that my one true solution will solve all the problems of the world.

Yes, technically there is nothing that is 100% clean. But with nuclear and water, you more or less control the area of contamination and you don't have a permanent production of toxic waste that goes everywhere and is impossible to get out of the environment again.

I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

> I have heard 4th generation nuclear is pretty clean.

You heard wrong. 4th generation nuclear doesn't actually exist anywhere but on paper.

I hear nuclear fusionand perpetual motion machines are pretty clean.

This is considered 4th gen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM

Has the war in Ukraine changed your perspective at all? A stray missile could irradiate all of Europe; no other form of energy can lead to such widespread damage. Perhaps mega-hydro projects, but the damage there is at least localized.

No one develops 4th generation nuclear simply because nuclear waste is a minuscule problem. On grand scale, even with all the security measures, it's actually pretty easy and cheap to just bury all the nuclear waste. So it's not really worth to recycle it, or make 4th gen reactors.

If this is about the lead in the solder then this is a huge nothingburger.

Solar panels are assembled with tin-silver-copper solder.

Here's the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342671383_Metal_dis...

Hydroelectricity causes pollution. Flooding a piece of land causes more conversion of metallic mercury to organic methylmercury.

> Increased methylmercury concentrations in water and fish have been detected after flooding of soils associated with reservoir creation (e.g. for hydroelectric power generation)

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylmercury#Environmental_so...

The relevant point is that the waste from renewables is dominated by mundane things like glass, plastic, aluminum, and steel.

This means it's pertinent to ask: is the quantity of waste from renewables important compared to the quantity of these produced by society in general?

And the answer is "no". So the problem of dealing with such waste has to be dealt with anyway by society; the waste of renewable energy sources just increments the problem slightly.

This is different from nuclear energy, which introduces an entirely new kind of waste not produced by society in general.

The thing is that nuclear research has been stiffled for decades. It is possible to create nuclear reactors that consume their own waste.

Nuclear boosters can't seem to produce economical power, but they sure seem to be able to crank out the excuses.

A great deal of time and money was spent on nuclear reactors that destroy actinides. The conclusion is it's considerably more expensive than the nuclear technology we have now. That's why it's not being done.

Imagine if starting in the 1950's we'd spent on the money we spent on nukes on solar instead.

Could you explain why you consider nuclear power to be more clean than wind? That seems counterintuitive to me.

I can't talk to a comparison, but wind turbines have a finite lifespan and leave a lot of fibreglass behind. We're a lot better at piling it up than actually bothering to recycle. We can but virgin materials are cheaper and GRP isn't fun to process.

Almost certainly better than nuclear though, right?

Wind turbines do not produce a lot of energy in total so you need a lot of them.

Thousands of tons of concrete are poured into the soil for the foundation of one wind turbine, and the foundation is likely never removed, creating ecological implications.

And wind turbines also can not be recycled and go to landfills.

With nuclear energy, the newest 4th generation reactors are closed systems that consume their own nuclear waste, so there is no final disposal problem.

Yeah, lead is never good news because there is no level of exposure that isn't considered unhealthy. To quote the above wiki page:

> hybrid perovskites are very unstable and easily degrade to rather soluble compounds [...], which significantly increases their potential bioavailability and hazard for human health

Even if we're super careful about how we install and interact with substances like these ourselves, once we put it in our living environment it's going to come back to us the long way around through the food chain.

From the main wiki article on lead [0]:

> Lead has no confirmed biological role, and there is no confirmed safe level of lead exposure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Biological_effects

I'd rather use 20% more land than revisit the "woops, lead everywhere thanks to energy" of the 20th century.

The lead is contained within a solid panel, it's not like we're burning in our gasoline that pumps it into the air. As long as the panels are recycled I don't see the issue.

These panels will be used in utility scale projects which might be in areas prone to freak hail storms. Such a storm could pulverize the panels and the melting hail or rain could wash the leaded debris onto the ground below it. That can eventually make its way into the water table. Damaged panels in the rain/snow can have the same effect. Another scenario are hybrid farms where runoff from leaking or damaged panels could make its way directly into the food chain. Fires will melt and destroy panels and enable the lead to enter the ground and air. You also assumes every panel will be properly recycled and seeing how much illegal dumping exists to save a dollar I have little hope of a completely closed system.

So yeah, I see issues.

> I'd rather use 20% more land

This could actually be a pretty massive issue in theory on its own, though. We really need to be covering/converting parking spaces and reusing existing land waste.

I've been told that in France large car parks have to have covered areas with solar panels on top.

> revisit the "woops, lead everywhere thanks to energy" of the 20th century

That seeeeems unlikely to me. We know the dangers of lead now, and it is treated much more carefully. It's absolutely good to be aware of, but I don't think we're going to make the same mistake.

Also worth considering that coal & garbage-fueled plants output lead directly into the atmosphere[1], so if these help take coal plants offline, it's still a gain even if they aren't perfect.

[1] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/abs/10.1289/isee.2021.P-143

We knew the dangers of lead when we put it into gasoline. We let industry leaders gaslight us into thinking it wasn't something to worry about.

No need to blame faceless corporations. The inventor was famously complacent about it.

  Facing a crowd of journalists, inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. poured a lead additive over his hands and then proceeded to inhale its fumes for about a minute. Unfazed, he said, “I could do this every day without getting any health problems whatsoever.”
  Soon afterward, Midgley needed medical treatment.

> We know the dangers of lead now, and it is treated much more carefully.

Like we don't cover our roofs with solar panels made from lead crystals.

Not all perovskite cells use lead, and there's nothing about the composition of those panels on the article.

> Not all perovskite cells use lead, and there's nothing about the composition of those panels on the article.

That does not mean we should dismiss the issue.

>lead is never good news because there is no level of exposure that isn't considered unhealthy.

Brass has lead in it. That's a lot of doorknobs, faucets, and zippers touched every day.

"Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass

Plumbing brass has traditionally contained high levels of lead, but it's not supposed to anymore, except for things intended for non-drinking-water purposes, which unfortunately includes outdoor water spigots.

I wouldn't be shocked in doorknobs had lead in them beyond trace amounts, but it isn't guaranteed.

Not sure what you mean. That it's okay to be exposed to lead because it exists in existing objects?

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