Adding some personal analysis to your point, the last time I looked at plastic market research in detail, the two biggest markets by volume and revenue were packaging and insulation, which I believe were dominated by thermoplastics. Those are the big ones if you want to make an impact on plastic usage.
Also, pulling from memory that may not be quite right, but I recall roads taking a substantial amount of polymer additives and that tire degradation is a major source of microplastic exposure for humans. The tire problem is poised to get worse with EVs being so heavy and accelerating so hard that the tires are bigger and wear faster, but I'm not aware of even any promising research there besides more bio-based feedstocks to improve the sustainability.
Having worked in polymers and seen the development of some recyclable, 3D-printed thermosets like what's proposed here, I think this is a fair take. On the whole, I'm glad to see other researchers continuing to research the space.
There are a few big challenges to be managed. One is material diversity—it's cool they got it to work with one monomer (most thermosets are two that you mix together), but it's a long road to showing the process works well in just one application let alone. To make a substantial impact, the process would have to be suitable to a bunch of different applications, likely requiring different material properties that would require many different monomers.
Then we can talk about value. While the value of fully recycling plastic can be managed as an externality by government taxes/fees, the big question is how much it actually costs in energy, time, money, and material waste that somebody has to pay for—there's no free lunch here, and it's rolling all those costs back up into the product. I have been secretly hoping that automated waste sorting and excess solar capacity could be used to run such waste management processes and close the business case, but energy demand and prices seem to only be going up due to AI. Still, it's good there's another example of it being possible but a long road to really reducing single-use plastics.
One theory of nonproliferation says we should bury spent nuclear fuel, burying 98% of the possible energy output, because if you reprocess the fuel you get Pu isotopes which could conceivably be used to make a bomb.
Trouble with that is the undesirable isotopes for bomb making decay faster than desirable isotopes so and the radiation from fission product today so 4000 years from now the Mormons and the Scientologists might be fighting over control of Yucca Mountain.
A sustainable plutonium economy could use much more of the energy in the fuel (consuming Pu almost completely in the long term), but requires maintaining a substantial stock of plutonium in reactors, spent fuel, and the reprocessing system for a very long time. Hypothetically somebody could nick Pu239 from such a system but it will usually be contaminated with enough other isotopes to make it undesirable for weapons. (A leading nuclear state could explode low-quality Pu because you want weapons that are easy to handle) Real nuclear terrorists might go for the Np237.
At times the Democrats (Jimmy Carter banning commercial reprocessing) and Republicans (Ronald Reagan repealing the ban but nobody wants to do it) have taken positions on the issue, but it is really a 1000+ year problem and it seems our politicians struggle to look 5 minutes ahead never mind to the next election.
Here in Michigan (USA), there were no ballot measures related to nuclear proliferation which I could vote for or against.
Where should I have looked for information about the long-term consequences, with regard to nuclear proliferation, of the various political candidates' getting elected?
An excellent question. The long-term consequences are the realm of analysis, not politics, which is why I wrote this article. Those ideas shape how politicians make decisions and which issues to prioritize. To understand how your vote may impact foreign policy, study a candidate's knowledge, attitudes, and experiences of our relations with other countries. Specifically study their attitudes towards security guarantees, their language towards allied nations (especially the ones failing to meet their commitments to NATO), and how they respond to Russia's nuclear threats. If they are an incumbent, consider signing up for https://www.govtrack.us/ to get personalized updates about how your representatives vote on these matters.
I'm the author, and I'm always deeply flattered when people submit my stuff. Thank you! Happy to chat more, as there was a ton of research that went into it, most of which didn't make the final cut.
The US government is dedicating something like $39B to the silicon business—is it using it wisely? Part of a series on the modern silicon foundry business, this chapter sets up the problems in the US supply chain circa 2022 that the CHIPs Act could address. The result is a set of strategic questions that will help grade the program's success.
People seemed to enjoy my deep-dive on 155mm, so I'm sharing another on leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing, an industry I actually have some experience in. Please let me know if you enjoy it and want more.
I'm a huge Dan Carlin fan. I started my career as a mechanical engineer, and I have a deep appreciation for chemistry and materials science, as everything rests on that. Most of the early transistor legends were chemists after all. Hence, I wanted to go a little deeper on the technical side with this blog, focused on the here and now.
FWIW I have spent a few years leading GTM strategy for startups, am consulting on marketing for startups, and thinking about getting back into a startup, so I'd be open to a conversation about what you're trying to do.
Fundamentally, marketing is about 2 things: awareness and engagement. Awareness is generally about socializing the problem, how current solutions fail, and what the gaps are, in a way that directly maps to your product. Each market is different enough that you have to appreciate the context: who has this problem? Do they know they have this problem? Have they budgeted for a solution (i.e. are they in-market or are you trying to convince them to spend money on it)? The classic b2b trap is everyone telling you it's a problem, but it not being enough of a priority that they actually spend time fixing it. That's often more indicative of a product problem than a marketing problem, but it shows up most in weak GTM. Validating that in your early GTM is key.
Similarly, engagement is context dependent, but I like to think of success as moving them to the next step of the funnel. Do they believe they have a problem? Are they looking for solutions? How are they going to make a decision about which to bring on board? What information can you offer to frame your offering in the best possible light vs. their other options (including no solution)? Build your collateral to that.
I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece so much. Honestly, I expected to get 20 views on the whole thing, as I felt like a crazy person researching this area for like 6 months. That collapsed in the belief I probably can't do much to help, at which point I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else in the wilderness.
I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, which I interpret as Congress' lack of urgency. In the nightmare situation of a hot war in the Pacific, that attitude would change on a dime, and I still think Operation Warp Speed is the primary example of how we would respond to direct threats. Similar to COVID, I would much rather deter such a situation with bold action now than wait until we're certain we'll need them, which will cost many more lives.
And I've heard dubious things on Replicator too, but thankfully, smart defense private money is going to truly disruptive dual-use tech that is autonomous, resilient, and ultimately attritable. That combination is the best answer for democratic countries that care about soldiers' lives vs. authoritarians sending human waves.
I'm sort of charmed the author directly replied. Thank you for your work. I'm not an arty or missile SME, but, speaking as humbly as possible, I am one in the realm[0] of technical publications, IETMs[1], specs and such.
[0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling.
[1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.
This was an idea I considered, but I'm not enough of a metallurgist to know how feasible it is. In a crisis, I imagine we would try lots of things, but it's easiest to start by just getting out of our own way with proven tools and processes. After all, they're co-designed with weapons systems that are well understood and highly effective, and we'd be replacing all that with entirely new systems in a conflict. It's messy.
Also, pulling from memory that may not be quite right, but I recall roads taking a substantial amount of polymer additives and that tire degradation is a major source of microplastic exposure for humans. The tire problem is poised to get worse with EVs being so heavy and accelerating so hard that the tires are bigger and wear faster, but I'm not aware of even any promising research there besides more bio-based feedstocks to improve the sustainability.