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Graphene is likely to cause negative environmental impacts if spilled
- jacquesm 13y agoOne of the worries around graphene and other nano materials is that we'll see a re-run of the asbestos disaster. Once thought to be a fantastic material that saw widespread adoption because of its useful properties asbestos became a pariah material once the link with lungcancer was made. Asbestos and graphene have some elements in common (mostly: very thin needle like particles), which could lead to similar trouble (lungcancer). see http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/graphene-inhaled-lungs.asp http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/graphen... Nanomaterials have their own particular set of problems when it comes to the environmental impact.
- DanBC 13y agoYet we let very many people die each year from the very small particles emitted by vehicle exhausts. About 5,000 people in the UK die each year from vehicle pollution. http://bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116 http://bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116
- CalRobert 13y agoA fair point, but people apparently don't care. It shocks me how people stress about their cell phone giving them cancer (or windmills giving them headaches, supposedly) while willingly inhaling automobile exhaust and complaining that attempts to address this are somehow impinging upon their freedom.
- tormeh 13y agoIt's because, for many, the car represents freedom. As in, freedom to go wherever they want. To not rely on someone else's transport. It sounds silly to me, but apparently that's how many people think.
- meepmorp 13y agoI think it's also because people think they know how to assess the risks of cars. They think of crashes, maybe, as the primary (if not sole) risk. They don't know of anyone who's ever died from car exhaust, apart from perhaps a carbon monoxide suicide. Cell phones are newer things in people's lives. There's less established understanding of what they can do. Combined with a general fear of radiation, and the associated risks of cancer, and it's easier to believe you'll get cancer from a phone than from car exhaust.
- andrewflnr 13y agoThink about that. Most people don't know anyone who has died from exhaust, but almost everyone knows someone who has been involved in a crash. We might not be sufficiently afraid of cars, but I think rating the danger of crashes above exhaust is reasonable.
- CalRobert 13y agoMost people know somebody whose emphysema, cancer, or other air-pollution related disease was at least exacerbated by exhaust. They just don't know that they do. This could even be you a few decades hence. Ironically this is similar to the danger posed by low-level radiation releases (except exhaust is far more dangerous), except everyone freaks out when their local radiation levels are 10% above baseline, but nobody cares when local pm2.5 levels are 20% above baseline. (They do notice at 1000%, to their credit).
- CalRobert 13y agoThis is a shame, and I speak as somebody who really enjoys a good road trip. Cars, when used as a primary (not supplementary) means of transport, are an utter menace to walkers, cyclists, and as we've established, people who breathe air. Maybe I'm biased since I was a bicyclist in LA for 18 months, but they destroy cities, kill people in droves, and of course aren't great for Earth. Nevermind the fact that walkers, cyclists, and public transportation users now have to cross much farther distances because two thirds of the land in that godforsaken hellhole is auto infrastructure, or subsidize automobile ownership with taxes that support street parking and parking minimums making it illegal to open a restaurant or build an apartment building without OCEANS of parking because the local NIMBY's complain about how they might have less convenient access to unlimited, taxpayer-subsidized automobile storage. Anyway, back to graphene. As amazing as these materials sound I worry greatly about their environmental impact. What do you do when your lungs are full of graphene? Your blood stream? It seems unlikely the liver is well-suited to removing it from the body.
- jacquesm 13y agoThat's true. And that's a real issue. But asbestos is now banned for fairly good reasons, the benefits did not outweigh the downsides in the eyes of the regulators. And that's the right way to approach things like this, evaluate the ups a material offers compared to the downs. People will die (for the foreseeable future at least), the question is what they die of and if you can prevent some of those deaths without a high price to society then you should do so. Consider roads, people die there as well, but the price we'd pay if we shut all the roads down would be prohibitive so we don't. (pretty apt for me because I witnessed the most gruesome traffic accident 4 days ago in Germany near Dinslaken).
- antris 13y ago> Consider roads, people die there as well, but the price we'd pay if we shut all the roads down would be prohibitive so we don't You say that as if just shutting down all roads without any optional way of transport is the only solution available.
- aaronem 13y agoYou say that as if "just shutting down all roads" were, however modified, at all a sensible thing to suggest, unless you number among your desiderata the messy collapse of the existing civilization, to be replaced by one which doesn't rely on a road transport network for survival.
- DerpDerpDerp 13y agoYou're really, really in to the strawmen, huh? Shutting down many of the roads in cities, where the effects of cars are most pronounced, wouldn't remotely cause the "messy collapse of the existing civilization", and is a meaningful partial step.
- aaronem 13y agoOh, well, that's much more reasonable, of course; it's not civilization entire you'd like to see collapse, just cities. How do you imagine this working, pray? "Build lots of trains" I expect to feature prominently in any response you might make, and that's fine as far as it goes. How do you envision their cargo making its way from there? Cities depend on endless fleets of grumbling, farting trucks, which of course no one loves, and presumably by now you'll have scrapped them all and had them melted down for their steel. But that leaves tons upon tons of goods -- tons and tons just of food and drink, every single day. How d'you plan to shift all that? Do you envision streets full of carts and horseshit? Hand-drawn wagons and barrows? Coffles of laden, staggering slaves? Or do you instead fantasize about what in the early Cold War was called "decentralization" -- put short and simply, the enforced diaspora of millions upon millions of city dwellers into a countryside which has neither need nor desire for their presence, to say nothing of places to put them all? Oh, that'd go so much better! I'm not sure who'd hate whom worse, or where the riots would most likely start, but I'm sure that scheme would make for a stretch of history delightfully full of incident -- the sort of thing for which future high school students will find it actually worth keeping their eyes open in class, assuming future high schools reverse our modern degradation at least to the extent of resuming proper instruction in history. Or have you some other fantastic scheme? Honesty compels me to admit that I have never yet encountered a utopian theorist whose fancies bore up under anything remotely resembling rigorous criticism, to say nothing of reality's much harsher judgment. But, while no longer young, I'm far from dead yet, and I don't imagine I've heard everything there is to hear. Perhaps you will astound me.
- ecopoesis 13y agoI wouldn't say we just "let very many people die". Vehicle emissions have improved dramatically over time[1] and will likely continue to improve. Unlike asbestos, banning cars cold turkey would have had too large an impact on society. Could we have tried to improve car emissions quicker? Yes, but just like the asbestos industry fought regulation, the car industry did too. Yet still, as anyone who has tried to breathe in a major American city can tell you, things have gotten better [1] http://theenergycollective.com/jamescoan/85164/vehicle-emissions-standards-regulatory-success-story http://theenergycollective.com/jamescoan/85164/vehicle-emiss...
- duaneb 13y agoIf we're getting into numbers of deaths, neither pollution or asbestos actually figure into the conversation much. It's just scary to think that our safety can change without our behavior changing.
- danmaz74 13y ago"is that we'll see a re-run..." shouldn't it be: "is that we could see a re-run..."
- jacquesm 13y agoWorry implies 'could'. You don't need two conditionals.
- DanBC 13y agoThis feels sensible. We don't know what happens; there are reasonable mechanisms of action that could be harmful; we have some experimental evidence that it could be harmful. What we need to do now is calmly investigate ways to control pollution and toxicity, and better manage clean-up and recycling. Modern electronics use plenty of stuff which is harmful to people and the environment. Have a look at the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana for an example of terrible consequences (human and environmental) of our poor handling of e-waste.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoIts data but not information. What is the rate graphene naturally occurs? How much of a spill is significant? Its largely impossible to guess if this research is at all important without knowing the context.
- Goopplesoft 13y agoCertainly a bad time for graphene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671355
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoAt least it's a risk that can be assessed before it's put into wide-scale production and use; in the case of asbestos, it was everywhere when it was discovered to be harmful. Somehow I doubt graphene and nanomaterials are going to be widely used in insulation and paneling. Graphene if it's used in CPU's will be encased in heat sinks and whatnot, and waste can be handled accordingly. In production, they're already processed in clean rooms with heavy filtering, so I doubt those will be a risk.
- jacquesm 13y agoA graphene based aerogel would be a fantastic material for insulation! http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153063-graphene-aerogel-is-seven-times-lighter-than-air-can-balance-on-a-blade-of-grass http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/153063-graphene-aerogel-i...
- arethuza 13y agoWouldn't that carbon aerogel be incredibly combustible?
- jacquesm 13y agoAt a guess, yes (it's carbon after all), maybe we could cover it in Asbestos?
- arethuza 13y agoTrying not to sound too much like a pyromaniac, it might be pretty interesting to see carbon aerogel burn - after all there is little mass there so it can't produce that much energy. Maybe good for party tricks - hold a chunk of it in your hand and set fire to it?
- jacquesm 13y agoFlashpaper? Flashmatter? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose
- morgante 13y agoClicked this thinking it was about the real-time dashboard, mystified as to what could be not all good about D3. [1] [1]: https://github.com/jondot/graphene https://github.com/jondot/graphene
- dfc 13y agoWho changed the title?
- snowwrestler 13y agoAs I understand it, the risks of nano particles are difficult to gauge in advance because their interaction with biological systems depends in part on their surface shape. This is different from typical understandings of chemical toxicity, which depend primarily on composition and dosage.
- BenefitOfDoubt 13y agolikely to cause negative environmental impacts if spilled Isn't this true for millions of things that we use every day?
- deeviant 13y agoIf graphene is toxic, that's bad, as it's a product whenever graphite based pencils are used.
- jessriedel 13y agoAny idea how much actually flakes off a pencil? Presumably the quantities are vastly lower than if it were produced in bulk.
- smnrchrds 13y agoThe article talks about graphene oxide. It probably has completely different properties.