A (surprisingly for a newspaper) good article about its lack of commercial success:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/13/could-graphe...

> So what happened to the graphene revolution? Why has it not transformed our world? Sir Colin Humphreys, professor of materials science at Queen Mary University of London, has a straightforward answer: “Graphene is still a very promising material. The problem has been scaling up its production. That is why it has not made the impact that was predicted.”

That article puts nuclear in a "list of technologies that failed to make the grade". So I question everything else in the article.

I agree that nuclear is underutilized, but putting it on the same list as an electric bike that flopped is.... I don't even have words

Whatever your feelings about nuclear power, you can't really argue with the reason they think it has "failed to make the grade":

> “Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter” – Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1954.

Disagree. The comment is on price. Price is driven by a huge number of factors. It's not as simple as "if nuclear is successful, price is low otherwise it's high". One of those reasons is that when someone is more available you consume more, making price sticky.

Also, consider where that comment comes from. It comes from a person who benefits from arguing that nuclear has magical economic powers. So you're saying that it's ok to say "nuclear failed because it didn't live up to ridiculous hype?". No, nonsense. Nuclear has been a huge success.

The price comment was not about "price is low"; it was about it becoming SO plentiful that the overhead in metering the cost would exceed the revenue and it could be just an on/off subscription

This HAS happened with telecom services, where long-distance calls used to even be sometimes only one town over, and were charged by the minute. Toll-free (800)- numbers were a big deal. Now, the network is so successful and calls so numerous that it is literally too cheap to meter - you either subscribe or you don't. Per-call metering is only the case in some international calls.

Nuclear electric power could have become this ubiquitous and successful, where the overhead of per-kilo-Watt metering outweighed the revenues. It would have merely had to scale up several more orders of magnitude. THIS was the prediction.

Obviously, although nuclear did have some success this did not happen. The costs of commissioning, building, and decommissioning individual plants were just too high.

We cannot conflate the actual modest success, producing barely 20% of power in the US in 1995[0], with the prediction of nuclear succeeding like telecomm.

It did not happen.

I think it could yet happen with some of the new small (neighborhood-scale), self-contained, inherently safe designs. But that is another prediction.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273208/nuclear-share-of-...

I guess we differ in that you call generating 20% of the energy in the USA "not a success" lol

Yikes. I specifically said it was a success.

But after 2/3 of a century, nuclear has clearly failed to attain the level of success of other technologies, and it's success has been capped.

Moreover, nuclear is now on a clear and accelerating decline. The peak was 1995, producing 20.1% of US power, and it's now fallen from 19.7% to 18.2% in the last two years.

I wish nuclear had enjoyed more success; it still may with new smaller-scale and inherently safe technologies.

But the current cost profile and construction profile is so far out of line with the continually-rapidly-declining-costs of competing solar and wind technologies, that current nuclear is only falling further behind. To build a nuclear plant vs solar or wind requires far more capital, has a far longer permitting process and construction process before a return on capital can even begin, and a far more costly end-of-life phase (notice we're not even mentioning the usual highlights of nuclear waste disposal, containment, and nuclear material proliferation). Nuclear has simply become an unmanageable option.

So, considering that it's success was limited, and is now in decline with no end in sight, how is it unfair to characterize it as "failing to make the grade"?

The United States has failed at nuclear power. It's much more successful elsewhere.

Where is nuclear energy too cheap to meter?

Measuring success this way is nonsensical. Is there anything that is too cheap to meter? Are other forms of energy also unsuccessful until they produce energy too cheap too meter? This isn't serious criteria.

The argument is that this is a silly framing with which to judge success. I agree!

I for one am extremely content consuming energy, more than half of which is nuclear, followed by hydro. It is very successful.

Measuring success by whether the proponents delivers on their promises seems entirely fair.

By that criteria, everything is a failure. After all, it's the job of the proponent to oversell you on things.

What sort of life experiences have made you come to this conclusion?

Has nobody ever told you "come on, it'll be fun" and proven to be right by subsequent events?

You can buy "heat spreader" sheets on Digikey that are graphene. They're used to help spread heat laterally when you don't have much thickness to work with.

How quick do you expect a material science innovation to land in commercial products?

E.g. if the superior quality of material X is proven in one study today, it might take at least a decade for material X to make it into a first run of a prototype chip series — maybe — if there have been a hundred follow-up studies that showed promise as well. Then how long does it take for that prototype chip series to feel like a viable alternative to existing, trusted solutions for product manufacturers? Most manufacturers will rely on the trusted, tested, known thing and only slowly will the new tech seep into their portfolio. At least another decade till you see significant adoption.

The truth is that what we have in terms of materials is already pretty good — matching e.g. the precision with which we can manipulate silicone is not a thing you might just reinvent with another material with the snap of a finger. And because what we have is pretty good realizing the advantages of a new material is not a matter of years, but of decades. And this is a matter not only of physics, but of new manufacturing processes, a ton of R&D and investment. In some cases this might be easier, because the new material can be used with old processes, in other cases it might demand entirely different processes that haven't been invented yet.

So everybody asking where the revolutionary thing from last years material science paper is just shows that they have no idea how the things surrounding them came to be. These things are moving far slower than you think. But they are moving.

Graphene was insanely hyped close to two decades ago though. Every other month you'd hear stories of things that could be disrupted by it. That was my recollection, though could be biased and me misremembering. But it feels like a valid question, especially since it has been two decades.

Relevant section from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene :

> In 2004, the material was rediscovered, isolated and investigated at the University of Manchester,[13][14] by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".[15] High-quality graphene proved to be surprisingly easy to isolate.

Graphene has become a valuable and useful nanomaterial due to its exceptionally high tensile strength, electrical conductivity, transparency, and being the thinnest two-dimensional material in the world.[4] The global market for graphene was $9 million in 2012,[16] with most of the demand from research and development in semiconductor, electronics, electric batteries,[17] and composites.

There is also a section about applications that expands on it a bit.

When I say "a decade" that was meant as an example timespan. Depending on how complicated the processes turn out you could also look at "multiple decades" or in some cases also "never".

A problem with today's science world is that the funding is competitive to a degree scientists need to "sell" their findings with practical applications — the fact they expanded the edge of human knowledge has become worthless. So our systemically incentivized-to-sell scientists do just that. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it is just far fetched bs. But because the edge of current science is so precise, so small, so ho, so cold, so fast, so low energy, etc. translating even the best of finsings into commercially scalable processes has become a major undertaking and despite unprecedented wealth on the top of the society, the ones on top have become averse to risk.

I got that, but the question wasn't "where are the mind-blowing stuff we should have had by now", but rather - what are the most significant uses we've found? In my mind also implying that we might have long ways to go for the full potential.

Perfectly reasonable question, especially considering past projections.

Yep. They made entire disciplines of nanoscience and nano engineering to train grads to do jobs that didn't exist. I was one very briefly before seeing the writing on the wall and moving to electrical engineering.

generating AdSense revenue

I wonder if somewhere there is a Graphene Store -- collection of all product utilizing graphene for it's properties. And it's empty.

Still in the experimental stage really. So I'd say spin injection and work towards useful spintronic devices

Transistors and energy storage probably.

I have a heating pad that uses it. It's supposed to penetrate deeper, and does seem to help my lower back.

If it's placebo, I'll take it.