How to Use tellurium in a Sentence

tellurium

noun
  • The team used zinc oxide and tellurium to create the device.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 5 June 2026
  • Most of the tellurium produced comes from China and other countries.
    — From Usa Today Network and Wire Reports, USA TODAY, 17 May 2022
  • In addition to gold and copper, the drilling found tellurium, a metal used in the production of solar cells.
    — Laura Schulte, jsonline.com, 29 Sep. 2025
  • The effect depends on how much the zinc oxide and tellurium layers overlap inside the structure.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 5 June 2026
  • Most tellurium is produced in China, as are 90% of solar panels.
    — Tim Fitzpatrick, The Salt Lake Tribune, 12 May 2022
  • But the United States is second only to China in the amount of tellurium reserves.
    — Tim Fitzpatrick, The Salt Lake Tribune, 12 May 2022
  • Two decades ago, combinations such as lead and tellurium yielded ZT values of around 1.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 5 Dec. 2023
  • The raw materials required, like bismuth and tellurium, are rare, expensive, and trapped in chaotic global supply chains.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 23 June 2026
  • The researchers suggest that a family of mercury-cadmium-tellurium compounds appears to have the right properties.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 4 Feb. 2020
  • Four of the elements are named after planets (Earth – in the form of tellurium, Mercury, Neptune and Uranus).
    — Mark Lorch, Discover Magazine, 9 June 2016
  • Exploratory drilling in Wisconsin's Northwoods has found deposits of gold, copper, and tellurium.
    — Laura Schulte, jsonline.com, 29 Sep. 2025
  • The Fudan team fabricated prototype retinal implants using a mesh of tellurium nanowires.
    — ArsTechnica, 12 June 2025
  • Rio Tinto is building a plant at Kennecott that will recover tellurium, a critical mineral used in solar panels, from ore that has been dug up for its copper.
    — Rhiannon Hoyle, WSJ, 25 Oct. 2021
  • And earlier this year the company started separating and selling tellurium, an element that is useful in making solar panels.
    — Tim Fitzpatrick, The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 Sep. 2022
  • One of the study’s clear limits is that the researchers based their calculations on high future growth rates for thin-film solar panels, which depend heavily on indium, cadmium, tellurium, and tin.
    — Alexander C. Kaufman, The Atlantic, 11 Aug. 2025
  • Some examples include cobalt, indium, tellurium and dysprosium; the only way to mine them is to purify them during the refinement of other elements.
    — Xiaozhi Lim, Discover Magazine, 16 May 2020
  • The list also includes elements crucial to alternative forms of energy, such as tellurium found in solar panels and lithium used in batteries in electric cars and cellphones.
    — Dino Grandoni, Washington Post, 21 May 2018
  • For tellurite glass, as its structure was reformed, seeds consisting of clusters of tellurium atoms formed, and eventually grew into tellurium nanocrystals as the glass phase decomposed.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 12 Feb. 2024
  • However, glass made, in part, from the element tellurium (two down and two over from silicon on the periodic table) has a peculiar and newly-discovered property.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 12 Feb. 2024
  • The mystery centered on a compound made of thulium, selenium, and tellurium (TmSe₁₋ₓTeₓ).
    — Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 2 Nov. 2025
  • Those include tungsten, a critical mineral typically used in industrial and defense applications, as well as tellurium, which can be used to make solar cells.
    — Simone McCarthy, CNN, 4 Feb. 2025
  • The Rio Tinto Kennecott website says the facility mines copper, gold, silver, molybdenum and tellurium.
    — USA TODAY, 22 Apr. 2024
  • Toxic to humans, tellurium is now critical to the technology on which human civilization increasingly relies.
    — Aaron Timms, The New Republic, 2 Sep. 2022
  • In another nod to a clean energy future, the company also recently started refining tellurium at its Magna facility.
    — Tim Fitzpatrick, The Salt Lake Tribune, 8 June 2022
  • Chinese state newspaper the Global Times also announced export controls on items related to tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium.
    — John W. Dean, MSNBC Newsweek, 7 Apr. 2025
  • First Tellurium provided critical domestic sources of tellurium and other metals, allowing Michael to overcome supply challenges.
    — Tyler Shepherd, USA TODAY, 11 Dec. 2024
  • Most of the worries about solar panel production have focused on the elements that go into the panels themselves, like gallium, cadmium, germanium, indium, selenium, and tellurium.
    — Doug Johnson, Ars Technica, 25 Jan. 2022
  • TMDs are made up of materials that combine one of 15 transition metals such as molybdenum or tungsten, with one of the three members of the chalcogen family such as sulfur, selenium, or tellurium.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 28 Dec. 2017
  • In the debris, JWST spotted tellurium atoms (52 protons), which confirms that neutron star mergers can forge the rather heavy elements toward the end of the fifth row of the periodic table.
    — Quanta Magazine, 13 Dec. 2023
  • Physicists were baffled as to why this material would suddenly stop conducting current once the tellurium content reached approximately 30 percent—a change that its basic chemical composition could not explain.
    — Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 2 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tellurium.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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