140
Scientists use microwave radiation to recover copper from old VVF power cables
(www.pv-magazine.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
140 points (99.3% liked)
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That's very time consuming though. I think the idea is to incentivize recovery for large amounts at once, and quickly. A Glass Reactor size vessel is not very big though...
Is it time consuming though? You could probably feed it through a cutting jig at tens of centimeters per second or more, and as the other commenter said you have to cut the cables into small pieces anyways for the microwave processing.
Well, you're assuming this is all flat, unbent wiring. When this stuff is scrapped, it's just a folded mess or ball. They want to just take a big junkyard mess of wiring and melt all the plastic off without any toxic byproducts, then recover the copper.
They want but they can’t (yet)