Inspired by a recent piece by Gregg Levine:
If there was such a thing as anti-solar news written the way anti-nuclear news is, it might look like this...
Solar power advocates would have you believe that solar power is "clean", but they refuse to evaluate the entire production cycle-- no semi-conductor fabrication process is perfectly clean, and large scale production of photovoltaic cells requires very large scale semiconductor fabrication, far beyond anything needed for today's microprocessor industry.
The plunging prices in photovoltaic cells that have solar power enthusiasts so excited are manufactured in China, which has notoriously weak environmental controls.
A plant in China has already been shut-down due to local protests concerning massive fluoride contamination of the country-side producing a tremendous increase in rates of cancer.
China closes solar-panel plant after protests, September 20, 2011, by Jonathan Kaiman:
Reporting from Beijing — Authorities ordered a solar-panel manufacturing plant in eastern China to close after four days of protests by hundreds of villagers who have accused the facility of causing air and water pollution, Chinese media reported Monday.
And keep in mind that you can not build electronic devices out of silicon without using hydrofluoric acid, one of the deadliest substances known to humanity. It is the only solvent that does not dissolve silicon, and yet can dissolve oxides of silicon. Just think about that for a moment: it dissolves glass.
And that's just the source of the fluoride contamination, we haven't even mentioned the other poisons used in semi-conductor fabrication, such as arsine gas, a common source of arsenic used as a silicon dopant.
How can solar power maintain it's reputation as a "clean energy" source in the face of realities such as this:
Renewable Energy's Dark Side: Solar Panels and Hazardous Waste July 10th, 2009, by Derek Markham:
The factory of one rising star in green energy, Evergreen Solar, operating at only 40% capacity, produced a million pounds of hazardous waste in 2008.
The amount of hazardous waste generated by Evergreen at its manufacturing plant in Devins last year comes from a report with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The chemicals reported include hydrogen fluoride, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide, of which some is treated on-site, and the rest disposed of off-site.
Advocates of "renewable energy" casually talk about ramping up it's use by factors of thousands, but no one can be sure of the consequences of expansion of that magnitude.
But my point here is not to argue against solar power. While everything above is true as far as I know, it's actually a lousy argument-- it literally has no sense of proportion to it. To really study questions like this you need some good estimates of magnitudes, a comparison of likely benefits and risks.
The implicit argument here is "hey this isn't perfect, they promised us it'd be perfect", but nothing is ever perfect, it's always a matter of making tradeoffs, of doing as well as you can within existing limits.
For example, it is true that to do silicon semi-conductor fabrication, you can't avoid using nasty substances like hydrofluoric acid, but it is possible to tune up the processes to use less of it-- and that's an example of a virtuous circle, you get to save money on raw materials and reduce pollution at the same time.
Further, we might approach the claims of the protesters in China with a degree of skepticism. They might be confused about how much damage the PV plant was creating. The dead fish they've observed might be from some other cause, e.g. a factory even further upstream.
In any case, A single dirty PV plant (or even a few dozen dirty PV plants) doesn't mean you can't build relatively clean ones; and one would hope that whatever damage they produce to the local environment would be outweighed by the global benefits.
Please try to remember this example of an exaggerated anti-solar screed the next time you read some alarmism from environmental activists. We don't appreciate the fear-mongering of the right wing press, maybe we should also watch out for it from the left.