Pouting Thomas

The Tellurium Supernova

Oh, dear.

Think twice before taking physical delivery of tellurium. When even a microscopic amount gets inside the human body, the victim develops a horrific stench that can last for the rest of their life. Which tends not to be all that long due to suicide.

I question the effect of the digital memory market on tellurium demand. Start with some absurdly conservative assumptions: that a bit cell is a 150 nanometer square, that the phase-change film contains tellurium equivalent to a 75 nanometer layer of elemental tellurium, that the memory uses 10 cells to store 8 bits, that the memory will sell for US$0.10/GB, and that sales will be US$100 billion/year. A gig of memory would contain 1.7E-11 cubic meters of tellurium, or 1.1E-7 kg. Multiply that by 1E+12 GB/year, and you get 105 tonnes/year of tellurium, or 116 U.S. tons/year. That's only half the current world production. First Solar doesn't have to worry about memory hogging the tellurium. The worry, if any, would be phase-change optical disks, which have huge bits and thick layers.

Regarding securing supplies, CdTe compounding is a low-margin, low-volume specialty business. The compounders are contractors, CdTe creation is a minor business, and they probably have no interest in learning to be international tellurium brokers.

"They do not need to go buy sand and pass it to their glass suppliers to make the glass."

Oh? Where I work, we are currently having impurity problems with a specialty glass product. We would LOVE to talk sand with the production folks, instead of working our way through the layers of an international commodity distribution chain.