how much would you save in nuclear regulation radiation release emergency response, litigation, regulations compliance, etc?
they would turn detroit into a optics factory and mass produce it. no one likes heavy radioactive isotopes. optics and grinding stuff is all freaking sand, its only expensive because we dont need it. economics of scale could make it disposable. you could hire a guy for 15$ an hour to watch over a machine grinding 10000 of them at a time in a factory that has 5000 of them.
zeiss is only expensive because no one wants it. world won't benefit from lens systems atm. unless its like boron nitride ceramics are basically a scam right now, all the tools used to make them suck in terms of output. if there was a use for them there would be a giant machine cranking out metrology grade glassware like rieces pieces.
someone would set up a row of like 50 different laps with different grits with ultrasonic cleaners and washing machines and laser measurements with robotic arms so your not grinding the same shit in the same goo for 3 days.
Grinding engineering is like in a barely alive state right now. You know with a surface grinder you can buy like 5 different wheels, buy 5 grinders and get a job done super quick. Instead you 'redress' the same grit wheel and mess with speeds and feeds so you can do the same job with 1 machine and 1 disk with some greybeard that figured out the tuning in his head. You can continuously sharpen a wheel and laser measure it while its running to speed things up, but none of it will make sense when you need to make a few military optics and some 4000$ cameras. No point in making cheap grinding wheels either.
Its not like they don't know how to make it super cheap, I don't think that there are even any real engineering problems, its just no demand. Same thing for laps and hones. If they had a tight spec you can make the machines to keep an aggressive precision machining speed going and get the stuff you need real fast.