• CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      You mean to say that a newly discovered material, produced by a university at research-scale, is expensive? How surprising.

      There will be a challenge in designing industrial production, sure, but remember that polymers used to be luxury items

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        newly discovered material

        These aren’t newly discovered. Carbon nanotubes are one of the precursor ingredients to the newly discovered material, and they’re actually very “easy” to make IIRC. What’s difficult about them is they’re very fiddly and labor intensive to make at even a small scale and no one’s worked out how to make a large scale industrial process producing them on a useful scale yet despite decades of research on the subject.

        Oh and any such industrial process would have to grapple with the fact that carbon nanotubes of a certain size are basically the same as asbestos dust (at a certain length the repair mechanisms in your lungs can’t break them down and remove them, leaving little jagged spikes embedded more or less forever the way tiny asbestos fibers are).