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It's really not, they just get a pass on disposal because it's not scary enough. Used windmill blades are going to be an actual problem in the near future, but

It's really not, they just get a pass on disposal because it's not scary enough. Used windmill blades are going to be an actual problem in the near future, but no renewable company has to buy land to hold 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels. Nuclear waste only exists as a problem to kill investment. We'd just dump it deep in the ocean, but it's too valuable for future use (unlike renewable waste).

Gwypaas 4y ago
They're not a problem. It's simply that in countries which still allow landfills it's the most cost efficient method since fiberglass itself is very low value. You also have the trouble of that wind turbines designed 20-30 years ago didn't have recycling in mind so they. It is a completely made up issue to allow the nuclear industry to say "what about wind turbine blades?!" trying to draw an equivalency between nuclear waste and inert fiber glass. > The catch here is that while wind turbine blade recycling is technically possible, landfill disposal remains the most cost-efficient and accessible option in many cases. > “Physical and material scientists can recycle blades now," Eric Lantz, wind analysis manager at National Renewable Energy Laboratory told USA TODAY in an email. "But, broadly speaking, scaling up recycling technologies will require more research and development to maximize the value of the recycled materials and improve the economics of the processes.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact-check-recycling-can-keep-wind-turbine-blades-out-landfills/8647981002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fac...
jhgb 4y ago
> Used windmill blades are going to be an actual problem in the near future, but no renewable company has to buy land to hold 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels. This makes no sense. Silicon-based solar panels are almost entirely recyclable (so if they leave any waste, you're doing something horribly wrong), and even if you couldn't use the somewhat problematic aged wind turbine blades in construction materials (which to my understanding you actually can), the weight of the global turbine blade waste mass is a tiny fraction of the global mass of other comparable waste (plastics, etc.) that our civilization is already generating. So "[holding] 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels" is an extremely unlikely thing to happen.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  CdTe panels (popular in US for mainly political reasons -- consider importing Si panels from Tblisi instead!) are likewise very recyclable: the 8 g/m^2 of cadmium are bonded to glass and overlaid with tellurium, both valuable and much more easily separated industrially than from native ore. There would of course be no public interest in "holding" used-up wind turbine blades because they are not a public health hazard. If you were obliged to hold them anyhow, it would be super-cheap for that same reason, so would not add any to the cost of turbines. By contrast, in addition to the expense of handling nuke waste, we are all subsidizing every nuke via indemnifying it against every conceivable disaster. We are obliged to do this because buying disaster insurance would push the price of nuke operations far, far outside even traditional marketable-cost envelopes. Meanwhile, renewables + storage now cut way, way under traditional costs, such that nothing else is even conceivably competitive anymore, most places. In places where solar and wind are not locally practical, it is becoming similarly impossible to compete, in predictable near-future scenarios, with importing synthetic fuel from more favorable sites e.g. in the tropics. (There are of course exceptions, such as where geothermal is already in place, but even there expanding geo is a hard sell. Steam turbines always require expensive periodic maintenance.)
  - jhgb 4y ago
    To my knowledge the major problem with CdTe panels has been the extremely limited availability of Te, which is probably the main reason why they're under 5% of the market today. If one expects solar power to grow even more in the future, that market share will almost certainly shrink further still. So disposing of CdTe panels is a self-solving problem in the sense that we can't manufacture societally useful amounts of them anyway.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Ja, I doubt anybody uses them outside US. We are assured a house fire cannot make your neighborhood a superfund site. I hope they are right.

Gwypaas 4y ago

They're not a problem. It's simply that in countries which still allow landfills it's the most cost efficient method since fiberglass itself is very low value. You also have the trouble of that wind turbines designed 20-30 years ago didn't have recycling in mind so they. It is a completely made up issue to allow the nuclear industry to say "what about wind turbine blades?!" trying to draw an equivalency between nuclear waste and inert fiber glass. > The catch here is that while wind turbine blade recycling is technically possible, landfill disposal remains the most cost-efficient and accessible option in many cases. > “Physical and material scientists can recycle blades now," Eric Lantz, wind analysis manager at National Renewable Energy Laboratory told USA TODAY in an email. "But, broadly speaking, scaling up recycling technologies will require more research and development to maximize the value of the recycled materials and improve the economics of the processes.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact-check-recycling-can-keep-wind-turbine-blades-out-landfills/8647981002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fac...

jhgb 4y ago

> Used windmill blades are going to be an actual problem in the near future, but no renewable company has to buy land to hold 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels. This makes no sense. Silicon-based solar panels are almost entirely recyclable (so if they leave any waste, you're doing something horribly wrong), and even if you couldn't use the somewhat problematic aged wind turbine blades in construction materials (which to my understanding you actually can), the weight of the global turbine blade waste mass is a tiny fraction of the global mass of other comparable waste (plastics, etc.) that our civilization is already generating. So "[holding] 100 years of turbine blades or solar panels" is an extremely unlikely thing to happen.

ncmncm 4y ago
CdTe panels (popular in US for mainly political reasons -- consider importing Si panels from Tblisi instead!) are likewise very recyclable: the 8 g/m^2 of cadmium are bonded to glass and overlaid with tellurium, both valuable and much more easily separated industrially than from native ore. There would of course be no public interest in "holding" used-up wind turbine blades because they are not a public health hazard. If you were obliged to hold them anyhow, it would be super-cheap for that same reason, so would not add any to the cost of turbines. By contrast, in addition to the expense of handling nuke waste, we are all subsidizing every nuke via indemnifying it against every conceivable disaster. We are obliged to do this because buying disaster insurance would push the price of nuke operations far, far outside even traditional marketable-cost envelopes. Meanwhile, renewables + storage now cut way, way under traditional costs, such that nothing else is even conceivably competitive anymore, most places. In places where solar and wind are not locally practical, it is becoming similarly impossible to compete, in predictable near-future scenarios, with importing synthetic fuel from more favorable sites e.g. in the tropics. (There are of course exceptions, such as where geothermal is already in place, but even there expanding geo is a hard sell. Steam turbines always require expensive periodic maintenance.)
- jhgb 4y ago
  To my knowledge the major problem with CdTe panels has been the extremely limited availability of Te, which is probably the main reason why they're under 5% of the market today. If one expects solar power to grow even more in the future, that market share will almost certainly shrink further still. So disposing of CdTe panels is a self-solving problem in the sense that we can't manufacture societally useful amounts of them anyway.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Ja, I doubt anybody uses them outside US. We are assured a house fire cannot make your neighborhood a superfund site. I hope they are right.