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by mchannon 5055 days ago
It's not just sand. It's sand with the oxygen removed. The oxygen (especially every last atom) doesn't want to leave.

Silicon has to be purified to 99.9999% at the very least to make a crappy solar cell. Add four more 9's to get to making decent microprocessors. Getting certain impurities out (that behave exactly like silicon in a chemical sense) is really difficult.

1 comments

You're using some interesting numbers. Citation?