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The Unexpected Use Scientists Found for 16th-Century Bullets

We have to use all that toxic waste for something, right?

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Lead bullets created centuries ago might one day help power your home. If that comes to pass, we can thank a team of scientists who found that toxic lead waste, including musket balls dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries, can be used as a key ingredient in the development of solar panels.

As reported by Gizmodo, based on a study published in Cell Reports Physical Science, researchers at Germany’s Jülich Research Centre have come up with a way to up cycle contaminated lead in turn it into high-purity lead iodide, a compound essential for perovskite solar cells, best known for being the leading candidate for the future of solar cell technology, possibly one day replacing traditional silicon panels while offering lower production costs and higher efficiency.

The problem in creating these types of solar cells is that they heavily rely on lead, an element that’s toxic to us and the environment, as well as a pain to mine and refine. But what if we didn’t have to mine it as much? There’s already tons of lead sitting unused in global waste deposits. The researchers aren’t proposing anything revolutionary, but it would still be impactful: what if we used all that lead just sitting around poisoning the world to power our high-tech solar panels?

Even the Oldest, Grossest Lead Bullets Can Become solar panels

Recovered lead, no matter how old and dirty, gets reshaped into electrodes and placed in a chemical solution. An electrical current then drives a reaction that produces highly purified lead iodide. Then, the materials are used to grow perovskite crystals.

The result is a solar cell with about 21 percent efficiency, not far off from the roughly 27 percent achieved by the best lab-made perovskites using expensive high-end materials. And all with what essentially amounts to a bunch of discarded junk, some of it being bullets specifically designed to kill people, now being converted into energy.

The researchers’ experiment used heavily degraded musket balls to prove their method could work with lead in any condition, even when it’s old and severely oxidized. The idea is that if it worked in this scenario, it could almost definitely work with more common industrial lead waste, of which there is a lot out there.

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Photo: Sytnyk, Peters, et al., courtesy of Cell Reports Physical Science The Unexpected Use Scientists Found for 16th-Century Bullets 2 minutes ago By Luis Prada

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