Featured in Not gone with the wind – 02-2010

The trouble with silicon

Triple Green, part 2: Silicon may be made of sand, but it is far from harmless. By the time the quartz becomes a module, it has lost its innocence. Nuclear power is used to smelt it, and the manufacturing process involves toxic chemicals and leaded fluxes and films. Crystalline solar technology is neither green nor clean but that could change. Part 2 of our series “Triple Green” on green energy, green recycling and green manufacturing.

By

pv magazine

15 Sep 2010

4

Hotter than a steelworks: the furnace is running at more than 2,000 degrees Celsius as glittering electric arcs heat up the quartz sand. In terms of chemistry, quartz is an oxide of silicon. When extreme heat forces the oxygen out of a molecule – a process known as thermal reduction – industrial raw silicon remains. …

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