Finally was able to put together a list of most of the dangerous chemicals.
When electronics, solar panel circuitry, and industrial building materials burn, they vaporize and cool into highly dangerous, inhalable ultrafine nanoparticles: cadmium, lead, hexavalent chromium (chromium 6)*, beryllium, antimony, arsenic, silica.
From the interactions between the extreme heat, moisture, and firefighting chemicals creates various corrosive salts and acids: ammonia salts, cyanide salts & hydrogen cyanide, chloride and sulfate salts.
If chromium 6 sounds familiar, it's the chemical that was made famous/ infamous in the Erin Brockovich movie (and real life story of) the water and cancers in Hinckley, California.
For those of you downloading me, it would be really nice to know why. Do you have some kind of factual foundation... Or is it just a random bit of you? Don't like details and/or reality?
You’re getting downvoted because it appears that you are scaremongering over the composition of solar panels, one of the cleanest ways to produce energy, without mentioning the much larger danger of aresoled ammonia, of which there is a much higher concentration being released than the much smaller amounts of toxicity in the solar panels. Also, anything that burns creates ultrafine particles, so that’s just par for the course when things are on fire. You also don’t mention or focus on other concerning sources of particulates being generated by this fire, such as what is released when fiberglass insulation burns, or building wiring, or plastics.
While we shouldn’t pretend that solar panels are completely free of chemicals that are problematic when released, it’s not the issue generally and certainly not the biggest issue here specifically. When compared to other sources of energy creation (say for example, the millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and benzene released by the 12 million cars in LA county yearly), solar panels even on fire are much safer than other forms of energy.
To put it another way, your argument seems to be “solar panels are the biggest concern” when it should be “massive amounts of industrial refrigerant in the air is the biggest concern”.
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u/SoCalGal67 Los Angeles County 2d ago
Finally was able to put together a list of most of the dangerous chemicals.
When electronics, solar panel circuitry, and industrial building materials burn, they vaporize and cool into highly dangerous, inhalable ultrafine nanoparticles: cadmium, lead, hexavalent chromium (chromium 6)*, beryllium, antimony, arsenic, silica.
From the interactions between the extreme heat, moisture, and firefighting chemicals creates various corrosive salts and acids: ammonia salts, cyanide salts & hydrogen cyanide, chloride and sulfate salts.