Your arithmetic is correct except for lead production figures and optimism on iodine. You are including recycling, so real production is about half of what you wrote.
The trouble is that at current rates of consumption the world will run out in 42 years (according to wikipedia). So this project would use 20% of all the remaining lead in the world. (Well not really, the film is not 100% lead, but it's still quite a lot.)
I call that "not enough". Although it might be worth it anyway. But what do you do when energy use goes up?
And despite people saying there is bromine and iodine in the ocean, there is no practical way to get it out of the ocean in quantity. There is everything in the ocean - in huge quantities! For example 1/10 as much gold as has ever been mined by humans exists in the ocean - but no one can get it out in quantity.
World production of iodine is about 1/200 of lead production and we already see that we barely have enough lead.
And world existence of iodine is 1/100 of lead. And considering we need a significant percentage of the lead in the world, there is no way there is enough iodine.
But we are ignoring the substrate. It won't be so thin, so we'll need a lot of it. I wonder how much of it is for mechanical strength (i.e. replaceable) and how much is essential.
Maybe this could work - using a thin film is very promising, but I'm skeptical this could be scaled.
I still don't understand where you're going with this. Just because it's not capable of entirely providing our current power consumption doesn't mean it's a bad idea for deployment. After all, our current majority power source is a finite resource that's going to run out, and similar resourcing issues apply to uranium.
You're probably going to reccomend Thorium, but the barriers to commercialisation there are more serious.
Personally I suspect we'll end up with 30% solar, 30% wind, 40% other (tidal, nuclear, geothermal, biomass etc).
> I still don't understand where you're going with this.
This is a useful technology only because it is inexpensive. If it were more expensive it would not have value.
Because it relies on rare elements it can not be used in scale because as soon as you do the price goes up, it is no longer inexpensive, and no longer useful.
This feedback loop has killed every solar technology I've read about except silicon.
The trouble is that at current rates of consumption the world will run out in 42 years (according to wikipedia). So this project would use 20% of all the remaining lead in the world. (Well not really, the film is not 100% lead, but it's still quite a lot.)
I call that "not enough". Although it might be worth it anyway. But what do you do when energy use goes up?
And despite people saying there is bromine and iodine in the ocean, there is no practical way to get it out of the ocean in quantity. There is everything in the ocean - in huge quantities! For example 1/10 as much gold as has ever been mined by humans exists in the ocean - but no one can get it out in quantity.
World production of iodine is about 1/200 of lead production and we already see that we barely have enough lead.
And world existence of iodine is 1/100 of lead. And considering we need a significant percentage of the lead in the world, there is no way there is enough iodine.
But we are ignoring the substrate. It won't be so thin, so we'll need a lot of it. I wonder how much of it is for mechanical strength (i.e. replaceable) and how much is essential.
Maybe this could work - using a thin film is very promising, but I'm skeptical this could be scaled.