alt Hacker News> however the big question to answer was : is the radar sensitive enough to tell the difference consistently between a material, and it's same counterpart with asbestos shards and at what concentration ?
Unless I missed something, it seems the "POC" device still made no effort to address this, which is the core feature — it just demonstrated classifying some other common materials. If that's true then the conclusions make no sense to me - why would customers be lining up if you still haven't proven the actual concept?
At least in the US (and this probably is different from Europe) it matters a huge amount how the asbestos is exposed to the environment. Asbestos that's sealed up generally gets (a) labelled so noone cuts into it (b) sealed up even further - but if it's exposed, the evaluation is more about "can it get into the air" (sealing is again the preferred step, epoxy over tile, that sort of thing) - actually removing it is a last resort. So "mere detection" is a really small part of the problem.
(Of course, the place I've dealt with this the most was a former post office building from the late 1930s - we didn't really need tests, a historian would probably have just said "of course you have asbestos" :-) It does expose an interesting problem with the labeling part, though: USPS as an ancient federal agency has its own rules for things and had a distinct asbestos markers - an A in a point-down triangle - which we fortunately found documentation for, it isn't public record.)