I am all in favor of a cradle to grave recycling program where manufacturers are responsible for recycling and disposal after service. It often just take small design changes to facilitate disassembly into recyclable components, so it is good to have that engineered into it from the beginning. We teach our engineering students about this in school today as best practice.
That said, the first article was non sensical....comparing the volume of spent nuclear fuel rods to the volume of solar panels. There is obviously a much larger mass/volume of material at a nuclear plant than just the fuel rods...its not like all of that stuff can last forever and doesn't need to be dismantled and disposed of (much of it as non-recycleable low or medium-medium level rad waste). Give me a break.
Most of the mass of solar panels is glass and the metal frames and supports used to hold them in place. The supports can be re-used after the panels degrade, and the glass and metal in the solar panel are completely and trivially recyclable. The silicon and conductor mass in the panels is surprisingly low....having been reduced intentionally during the price reduction process b/c the silicon is expensive to make per volume. Does this site state the mass of silicon in the panels....or the 100x larger mass of glass and metal supports? The situation here is much better than e-waste, where the parts are highly integrated....PV panels are just a bonded sandwich. The use of a potting agent that was soluble with a non-toxic solvent (like acetone or methanol) would make it trivially easy to disassemble and clean the different materials for recycling.
The second site was worse....just listing a bunch of scary concerns about the material (fiberglass) and big numbers for the amount of material. So, a million tons is a pile that would cover a football field. So the worldwide wind industry would cover 43 football fields per year, or fewer if you piled it higher? After a century you would have one little mountain of chopped fiberglass for the entire global wind industry. Sounds pretty sustainable to me. The author says it might take a long time to break down (its fiberglass, duh) and also that it might produce methane in a landfill (LOL). The article also starts with a 4 year old number (why not use a more recent one) and states the wind fraction in primary energy terms, which inflates the fossil contribution by 2-3X or more, rewarding the built-in thermodynamic and other losses associated with fossil combustion, but NOT renewable power.
The coal method in current use produces many mountains of ash as a solid byproduct, I am too lazy to compare, but it seems that any decent single coal plant produces its own hefty pile. Imagine how much toxic ash that is for 1000s of plants running a century! And of course we turn it into bricks and build elementary schools out of it. Will we make bricks and schools out of chopped wind turbine blades...why not?
any thoughts are we moving so fast we are creating another mess?
I would argue that with every generation of technology, the energy service and human value goes up immensely while the eco impact goes down. Could we power our civilization of today with biomass? What would be the eco devastation if we tried? Many historical civilizations that flowered literally had to chop down every tree before the curtain fell. So fossils are a lower eco-footprint tha biomass (compared to historical unsustainable practice) and there is not enough sustainable biomass to do the job. Fossils burned clean would be great for the environment if there were enough to keep the lights on for more than a century or so and if it weren't for all that CO2.
The amount of (trivially unrecycleable) PV and fiberglass waste being described here is tiny (and a landfillable solid) compared to the decimation from coal mining, oil spills, gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere for 100 generations, ash waste, dementia-inducing atmospheric microparticles, etc. So, give it a break. Renewable energy sources like wind and PV are affordable and sustainable for centuries using current practice, with minimal eco impact, which pales in comparison to the current approach.
