I fear the graphene will fall by the wayside due to legal and social pressure. News sources have already pointed out that it is significantly more dangerous, if inhaled, than asbestos; another material this is insanely useful for a number of applications but is effectively blackballed as a engineer-able material.
Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe. The fear of radiation exposer has turned it into a pariah in the world community; totally ignoring the fact the radioactive elements in coal emissions have kill more people in the last 30 years than 100 Three Mile Island incidences would.
Nuclear, by which I take it you mean uranium fission energy, is far from a clean energy source. Extraction and refinement both have environmental challenges, and waste disposal is very much an unsolved problem in practice. Simple in theory, but with problematic economical and political issues.
The "fear of radiation" is perhaps the least important problem (with bigger ones including cost, centralization, waste disposal and environmental issues), yet the only problem some proponents of the technology wants to discuss, perhaps with the implication that if we treat everyone else as stupid they will go away. Perhaps after so many years it is time to reevaluate that strategy.
> I fear the graphene will fall by the wayside due to legal and social pressure. News sources have already pointed out that it is significantly more dangerous, if inhaled, than asbestos; another material this is insanely useful for a number of applications but is effectively blackballed as a engineer-able material.
But, unlike asbestos, graphene won't be literally all around everyone right? And it won't be worked on by people who weren't informed of risks and provided with proper safety gear.
> But, unlike asbestos, graphene won't be literally all around everyone right?
Also unlike asbestos we may be able to manufacture products which use an astonishingly small mass of graphene to be useful. Perhaps that small mass can be suspended/isolated with other materials that will mitigate the likelihood of impacting humans.
> Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe.
Yeah, but what do you do about the waste? The US has tons of waste sitting around. The grand plan of using Yucca Mountain to store the waste fizzled. We have just postponed the cost to a future generation who'll have to deal with the waste we're producing today.
Harry Reid is due to retire from the Senate and whoever replaces him will not wield nearly as much power as he did when Senate leader. I think it will go into operation in 5-10 years.
I lived near one of the asbestos super-sites that the EPA was still involved in monitoring. Back in the day it had been a huge asbestos mine. As far as I know, it was safe when I lived in the area but the health impacts were still being felt.
Graphene will see adoption, but will probably be halted at the first sign of asbestos like diseases. I can only imagine how hard it would be to dispose of products with graphene correctly.
I just want to be able to build huge buildings. I want that landscape in the Star Trek reboot at the beginning when the mountainous building is in the background of the Iowa landscape.
That's a good point, but asbestos used to be in everything from pipe covers to shingles to oven gloves. I don't see any proposals for such bulk deployment of graphene.
Nuclear energy is very expensive. Not in the sense that your bills are high. Cost are hidden and paid by the government, largely. The initial project's cost is astronomical, but it always goes over budgets and deadlines. Those are provisioned for in the initial contract, so the additional cost is rarely talked about.
Nuclear companies are in bad shape nowadays, because governments around the world caught up with the way they conduct business.
I'd say in terms of impact on philosophy, religion and way of life, the large number of planets we're discovering.