I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form) had a field trip to Culham and also a double lesson/lecture done by a handful of Culham physicists back in school. I am very aware of what a privilege that was.
Now I'm 53 and been around the block a bit, I really appreciate how time is required for some things. A lot of time.
Superconductivity was first observed in solid mercury at a temperature of 4.19 Kelvin in 1911, not long after liquid helium was first produced in 1908.
The 1980's discoveries were of the first "high temperature" superconductors (where "high temperature" means "above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen").
Liquid nitrogen is much easier to deal with than liquid helium.
Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups.
I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).
Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups.
As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too. Here we are, magazines extinct, with fusion startups using LN2 superconductors. Also: no quantum computers, no space colonies, no flying cars (or even supersonic planes), and twitter/reddit/facebook are worse than Usenet.
> As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too.
I get it ...
But how many of them predicted their use in ~36,000 advanced medical imagery devices world-wide?
I'd love fusion power (and flying cars), too, but there's a whole lot of interesting technology between "check out my shiny new super-conductor" and "let's use it to contain plasma that's hotter-than-the-core-of-the-sun-kind-of-hot[0]" that we do benefit from[1], today, to not be too disappointed that we haven't quite reached the greatest potentials.
I don't know enough to speak intelligently on any of this -- who knows -- maybe fusion won't be a possibility until even higher-temperature super-conductors are created ... or maybe there's some other "not possible" in the way (until another discovery is made).
[0] And (if I understand things correctly) it's probably really unfortunate that they traditionally require extreme cooling, likely made more complex given the heat involved and almost certainly requiring far more power than would be required if said super-conductors worked at much higher temperatures.
[1] Myself, personally -- and I have a pretty cool 3D file of my brain backed up to my server as a result.
/// apologies: reading this over it sounded a little hostile; that wasn't intended -- I was merely offering a competing perspective, albeit poorly :)
> I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point
Absolutely right. People generally understand that "collective human knowledge[0]" grows but they think of it as a linear system. The speed at which knowledge grows accelerates -- not at an even pace -- but I'd wager somewhere near exponentially in a lot of places.
And each discovery can change our understanding of other things/accelerate discovery in other areas.
Very true. I remember cheering since the mid 80's every time the temperature for superconductivity went up, sometimes with 20 degrees K in one go. And then it was quiet for a long long time with a plateau. More recently, two major jumps, the last one of > 50 degrees (2017, H2S), and now this...
I've forgotten how many times one of the most important thresholds in our times has been bumped up a bit. Now we seem to be offered heaven on a plate.
If superconductance can be reliably demonstrated at RTP (you wear a light cotton shirt, instead of 1cm thick fancy weaves involving an awful lot of rubber) then we are laughing all the way to ameliorating climate change.
Even if this result is confirmed then I think it will take at least 20 years to dig in to reversing climate change.
No, the argument is that if this is true and it can be commercialized cost effectively that there may be an energy storage solution just over the horizon that would allow for all kinds of things that are currently impossible, such as summer/winter energy storage and other very nice to haves. It is obviously much too early to say anything about this so think of it as hope rather than anything more solid but it isn't necessarily about cheaper energy, just an almost perfect companion to cheap renewables whose main issue is that it is hard to store their output for the time when you need it most.
It may also make the energy (and economic) costs of fusion make a lot more sense, since superconductors are used to contain the plasma in fusion reactors.
I believe the biggest envisioned possibility is superconducting power lines. Those would allow long-distance power transfer with minimal losses. In the most idealistic scenario, you could imagine a belt of solar power plants around the globe connected by superconducting power lines, providing solar power 24h a day.
Of course, there are huge hurdles to such a project even if we did have the superconducting lines, but there are more realistic similar applications that might actually work.
>In the most idealistic scenario, you could imagine a belt of solar power plants around the globe connected by superconducting power lines
There's no technical impairment for doing this with current tech, and it's not clear the new tech is cheaper.
Power lines are already very efficient, especially the long-distance ones. We would save a bit on converting from HVDC to AC but that's also very efficient.
The numbers I found on a quick search are 3% loss per 1000 km for HVDC lines. That's a pretty huge loss for the 20k+ km lines you'd need to transmit power from daytime to nighttime areas on the globe.
I thought these were mostly fixed conversion losses, but checking this again you're right, it's 3% per 1000km (not including the conversion loss at the stations).
There absolutely is. Once you think about this on a global scale HVDC doesn't quite cut it. You can extend the day/night cycle by a few hours each way, which is already very impressive but it isn't enough to cover 24 hours and it definitely isn't going to help you in winter when you want to transport energy from the sunny hemisphere to the darker one.
We can easily generate more than enough renewable energy, just not when and where we need it. Being able to transmit energy over vast distances would greatly improve the economics of our existing renewable energy generation solutions.
I'm not sure what the GP envisions but one thing you could use superconducting materials for that don't require a bunch of extra gear to operate is to store energy in loops of it. This may well allow for a relatively high storage density (but probably not nearly as high as chemical ways of storing that energy but with better efficiency, and for stationary applications density is less of a factor than for anything mobile) with near instant charge/discharge times. Kind of like a solid state version of a flywheel.
That in turn could power an energy revolution which has the potential to reduce carbon based fuel consumption dramatically.
That's SF right now, but there are pathways to very interesting futures unlocked by a material such as the one described in the paper, all of them subject to the usual caveats that it's a 'mere matter of engineering' and that it may prove to be far too costly in practice. And it wouldn't reverse climate change but it could help slow down the acceleration of climate change.
Room temperature super conductors don't quench. Or at least, not until they reach the temperature at which they no longer work as superconductors, which for this one is 127 degrees Celsius.
That does make for an interesting failure mode if anything should every cause a small spot on a longer conductor to reach that temperature...
No, at the breach it will just burn up until the arc dissipates. But it will be an impressive fireworks display. A superconductor is in the end just another conductor, it has a well defined current carrying capacity while superconducting and if it stops doing that then that current will suddenly see an increased resistance, how much current is moving through it at the time it failes determines how fast and how violent it burns out when it goes, but it won't be unlike another transmission line failure. Those are still very impressive:
Fusion power require powerful magnets(essentially super conductivity is a requirement). Currently the best contender for commercial fusion is REBCO(see: Commonwealth Fusion Systems).
With cheap fusion power, we can begin pumping that CO2 back into the ground and forget about using fossil fuels for energy entirely.
Reminds me of a story: I was in college physics in fall '89 and our professor was telling us how he and his son spent the summer in Alaska prospecting for whatever material was all the rage in superconductors at the time. He was explaining that once superconductors broke the liquid helium temperature, it was going to be a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid helium is cheaper than beer."
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form) had a field trip to Culham and also a double lesson/lecture done by a handful of Culham physicists back in school. I am very aware of what a privilege that was.
Now I'm 53 and been around the block a bit, I really appreciate how time is required for some things. A lot of time.