That’s why Major and his colleagues started looking for alternatives to cadmium chloride, the crystalline compound used in the solar cell manufacturing process.
When you breathe it in, it is absorbed instantly into your bloodstream, where it basically serves as a kind of chemical chauffeur for toxic compounds of cadmium to travel all around your body.
Though researchers had already been pointing to factors unrelated to salt such as " deficiencies in the dietary life, " vitamin C deficiency, and the presence of cadmium in the intestines of widely eaten river fish.
As we have seen elsewhere, our own performance with lead (not to mention mercury, cadmium, and all the other industrial pollutants with which we routinely dose ourselves) does not leave us a great deal of room for smirking.
“To absorb a useful amount of sunlight with silicon we would need to use around 200 micrometers of material. " Major said. " For absorbers such as cadmium telluride, we need to use only 1 percent of the same material.”