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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

The direct impact could be relatively limited, at least for a while. Having a room-temperature superconductor is really awesome, but existing high-temperature superconductors are fragile and expensive. You can make motors, electromagnets, and power grids with much better efficiency—but that’s not so useful if the parts break when you look at them wrong.

You’ll still get better magnets and sensors, probably. Maybe even get new types of circuitry.

Just for comparison—we use silicon for integrated circuits. Not because it has the best performance, but because it’s convenient, it’s readily available, silicon dioxide is a good insulator, etc.

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Sensors could be huge I think, even with a material that's a total dud in terms of the superconductor power revolution. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a range of novel sensor approaches that haven't really been explored due to the practicality threshold of low temperature superconductivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID

Isn't the big win of superconductors that you can build batteries with them? Like, you just pump them full of power that goes round and round forever with no or trivial losses. I always heard that this was why they were interesting.

Until someone sneezes and all the power is released at once.

That's only if you run close to the limit. You'd only ever do that in controlled labs.

It is an option, but there are two downsides: - such a current generates a huge electromagnetic field. So it won't work for a car battery, but may work for grid storage. - price - there is a limit to how much current you can store, and so far this was the limiting factor - i.e. we don't really care about room temperature superconductivity in this case, but we care about the price of materials to build such batteries

I'm pretty sure you can pick coil geometries that cancel external magnetic fields. There may be some stray fields, but they can be quite modest with tight manufacturing tolerances.

It's an interesting idea worth exploring. The two places where I think feasibility may face challenge is in the energy density gated by critical current density and magnetic field and in raw discharge rate (giant inductors are not known for being able to change their current quickly).

Knowing peak capacity and aging is also tricky since you can't measure critical limits without hitting a quench (a very, very bad scenario). You'll need to maintain healthy margins so you don't have things blowing up on sunny days or after so many charge/discharge cycles.

The energy density is absurdly low.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...

Compare with this table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...

Back in the 90s or maybe early 2000s, everyone was convinced that silicon was almost dead for high-performance chips like CPUs, and that we'd all be switching to GaAs (gallium arsenide) very soon. Turns out that GaAs wasn't that practical and silicon's limitations could be overcome, so we still use silicon today.

Would this revolutionize MRIs?

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