This only can carry a small amount of current. I'm not sure how to figure out what small means (numbers are given in the article if you know how to use them!), but if the losses using regular wire are less than the energy needed to make this stuff then it isn't useful.
This is made out of lead. Even if it is useful for transmission, the difficulty of working safely with lead in a factory may mean it is impractical. Or it make leach lead into the real world making it not safe to deploy.
There are probably other ways this can turn into a "it works but isn't practical" thing that would force us to wait for theory (or luck!) to point to something better. What I wrote above is what I can think of in a couple minutes. Only time will tell though, I hope it works out.
Thank you for this.
> This is made out of lead. Even if it is useful for transmission, the difficulty of working safely with lead in a factory may mean it is impractical.
Have you been to a hardware store lately? A huge amount of pipe fittings for gas and non-potable water are made from lead. Factories don’t find it hard to work with lead. It might be inadvisable but it’s not hard.
We can argue about the "working safely" part, but in terms of "does this make it impractical?" the answer seems to be no under the current global regulatory environment.
Lead is still routinely used in many applications today, either in metallic form, from ICE car batteries, to fishing or hunting gear, or as chemical compound in different kinds of glass. And the same can be said about other heavy metals like Cadmium or Mercury. Industries also routinely work with much more nasty things than lead, so it really doesn't sound like a show-stopper.
Maybe a little bit. But I think it is more that it is a material with heavy atomic nuclei and high density, and thus effective at blocking radiation. And it is also relatively cheap.
They used to talk about using barium cement but it just can't compete, price-wise.
I think >80% of the current industrial use of lead is for batteries. It's probably still in the top ten most mined metals by dollar value and definitely by mass.
Aluminium, was so expensive until the Hall/(that other guy) process was developed, that it was used for jewellery [1].
Even today it's expensive and difficult to reduce Al ore to metal, which is a supply side problem.
The economy sort of has a "working capital" quantum of aluminium which also grows steadily from aluminium mining.
Lots of metals have very different and complex supply structures and thus completely different $$$ / volume curves for their supply.
Understanding the $$$ / volume curve of commodities is not something that is commonly considered when people try and predict the future. Mining a billion tonnes of Aluminium from an asteroid for example and safely landing it on Earth can never be profitable because the $$$ / volume curve for Aluminium is $0.00 at billion tonne volume.