I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if this is true?
With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and any sudden changes in morphology can be biopsied. The learning would be revolutionary for medical science as well- right now we have so little data on what kinds of benign growths people have that our best method for figuring out if a mass is a problem is asking if there are any other symptoms. Not to mention entirely new kinds of medical devices would be possible, eg using SQUIDs.
Ground-imaging MRI would also be revolutionized. Archeology, paleontology, geology, mapping resources and finding minerals would experience a quantum leap. You would be able to drive a car through the desert and spot fossils or faults or mineral signatures.
Space travel would become essentially free with the use of launch loops. Which would also make long-distance travel incredibly cheap and practically pollution-free. You would need electricity alone to reach low earth orbit, or to accelerate planes to multiples of the speed of sound.
Grid-level storage, peaker plants and load-following would become nearly obsolete. Superconducting catenaries would connect every nation on earth. Normally plants have to turn off when everyone goes to sleep; now factories in China can be powered by US fission. Canadian homes could be kept warm by Australian solar. HVDC interlinks would be obsolete. We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely.
CPUs could be anywhere from 10% to 50% more efficient. GPUs even more so. Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
This is actually a really good point I hadn't fully considered, but it's right: the primary reason we use high voltage anywhere is because it minimizes resistive losses (and the reason we use AC is because it's easy to transform between voltages).
But most of the stuff in my home doesn't need high voltage - it's all running at 5V or 12V. Or it's a motor which is magnetically driven and depends solely on magnetic field strength (which is independent of voltage).
If all your conductors have zero resistance, then high voltage is obsolete. You could safely run a residential property on 12V power. Home electrical hazards would a thing of the past.
We're using high transmission voltages to keep current down. Superconductors would not change this AT ALL; superconductivity generally breaks down not only with temperature increases but also magnetic field strength (i.e. current).
Switching large currents is also a hassle; especially with non-resistive loads.
And completely changing household electricity architecture is simply not gonna happen just to marginally improve safety, cost/benefit ratio is WAY too high.
Any amount of cross-section of copper though is not - you take losses at (I^2)*R. You lose power as a square of the current.
There is an enormous difference between using superconductors at high currents and using any normal material.
Obviously the impact of this depends on what the critical current of a hypothetical room-temperature superconductor ends up being...but REBCO tapes achieve current densities of >40,000A/mm2 (at 77K). Depending on what you end up with, the expense and danger of maintaining the high voltage infrastructure could easily be seen as not worth it - particularly if it speeds up the ability to build out and maintain power lines.
Sure, but transission losses are generally a low single digit percentage-- eliminating those will not have much impact, but on the other hand your superconductor is EXTREMELY unlikely to be even close to cost competitive with aluminum/steel core wire.
Even if you could achieve critical currents comparable to conventional high-temperature superconductors at ambient temperature (which appears *highly* doubtful!), keeping high power transmissions lines at human-survivable voltages would be a tremendous waste of super-conducting material.
And even inside homes it seems quite farfetched to me to scale down voltages-- nobody wants to use plugs and switches rated for 200 amps just for their cheap toaster...
Around 6-8% per 1000 km. That's a lot.
365x24x(1400x.07)x105 = $90 million per year. Adds up to the cost of the total project every 17-22 years. Over 20 years it's $1.8 million per km. If the superconductor is 20 kg/m (2.4" or 6.2 cm width, huge), that's $90 per kilogram. 10x the cost of copper.
In fact the only (practical) way to convert DC voltage levels is to convert to AC, do the level conversion, then convert back to DC.
Believe it or not, DC already is more efficient for energy transfer and why there are already DC high voltage transmission lines. You don't have to deal with reactive parasitics.
But again the killer is that AC voltages are so easy to switch and can by done with >99% efficiency.
85 volt DC carries the same power as 120 volt AC, but 85 volts DC is essentially safe to touch. The human body has a much lower AC impedance, so it's MUCH more dangerous. DC does still hurt, though.
40-80 volts (see also: split phases) DC is very convenient for most electronics. It's really just things with batteries that want 5-12 volts, but stepping that down isn't too hard.
At the grid scale, it's a question of which is cheaper. If the infrastructure becomes much more expensive (because the wires are SC) then you can save money by using DC (which gives you 41% more power). If its cheaper to use transformers than it is to use more superconductors and semiconductors to convert voltages, they'll do that.
Either way the grid would stay relatively high voltage (10s of kV), because it's just always going to be worth it at that scale to minimize the conductor area.
i don't have any data here, but I am dubious that a room temperature superconductor will bring down the price of MRI machines. a room temp superconductor only saves you a dewar, about $50k of liquid helium and a cryocooler. you still have to build the rest of the MRI, which is an _extraordinarily_ sensitive instrument
> Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
depends how sharp the phase transition is.
It might still be a large machine, but a bunch of bottlenecks disappear. With that, it is only a matter of time until a startup develops a much cheaper, smaller, and more efficient device.
The real benefits are indirect (from the viewpoint of the insurance people who unfortunately pay for it)- quality of life is much better if you catch it earlier, and the medical research benefits are huge.
Realistically, it's also not $250 even outside the US- not for the resolution needed to diagnose cancers. That's below the depreciation cost of a high end (say $1M) machine. 12 scans a day (it takes roughly an hour for an average scan, 12 is per day per machine is pretty average[1]) 7 days a week for 10 years is 43,800 scans. So ignoring interest, labor, and absolutely everything else that's $228 per scan.
A full body MRI takes an hour only for small patients. More realistically 1.5-2 hours.
[1]: https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=di...
I don't know enough about how this material behaves, but a superconductor "quench"* can be pretty catastrophic. I could see a room temperature superconductor battery causing fires from a quench.
*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_...
- higher efficiency turbines and solar panels - more clean energy for the same investment
- fusion?
- low-energy computing at higher performance, as we learned recently LLMs so far can't take advantage of hitherto zero marginal cost of software anymore
- democratization of advanced quantum computing?
It's all very exciting and in a truly replicable and industrially-feasible scenario I'm starting to feel this could be another 1960s kind of rate of change. One can dream, no? Maybe we can finally get rid of all the doom & gloom stories we tell ourselves and actually do something with these unexpected presents of our times? Think smartness instead of ignorance, (old) Star Trek instead of the latest Fallout fantasy on the horizon? Why not?
These and many more consequential innovations might develop just in time, as climate change is coming at us much faster than we are willing to admit (don't look up).
That said, even with all of that (including fusion) we will still need to cut our co2 emissions; drastically change our lifestyles / minimize consumption and deal with already locked in impacts hitting us sooner than later.
Enthusiastic midnight edit:
Also what's up with graphene based ICs and optical computing advancements? Competition of new old ideas finally come to be realized? What's next? I want a new breed of superconductor enabled Lisp Machines by 2030! Why not home brew "3D print" the whole thing? That should be the ultimate target here! The handling of "open source" lead would probably suck though %D.
I guess Alan Kay wouldn't be enthused by such a Lisp Machine renaissance in principle yet still stand with his "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" credo.
Let's predict a future for a planet that shifts back into balance!
All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning.
Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would enable.
I joke, of course.
And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build but can’t because of permitting reasons would have zero energy loss if we actually built them, which we won’t.
Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern, the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate and steer.
Carving up public spaces into those that are safe and those that can trivially injure or kill ruins the outdoors for so many.
SC could help enable nearly lossless transmission over power in HVDC lines, but HVDC lines are already significantly more efficient than our regular ones and we don't build them for a variety of reasons, so it might not make much of an impact there for regulatory/NIMBY/etc. type reasons.
It’ll be more like a thick pipe, perhaps buried.
Much easier it get a right of way, less environmental impact, less paperwork, less time to build.
* devices that currently use superconductors don't have to use cooling anymore, and so become much cheaper to build and operate (MRI machines, certain sensors, high-power magnets for things like fusion research, big generators, big motors). This is a pretty solid bet.
* devices where superconductors would be an improvement, but currently don't make economic or practical sense. These are almost certain to crop up, but which ones will pan out is IMHO very speculative.
In the latter category, things like computing chips, more sensors, certain art works (sculptures with permanently levitating parts, how awesome!), smaller motors and generators seem plausible.
But there is likely whole categories of things we haven't thought of that could benefit from either zero resistance or rejecting magnetic fields.
So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.
I do think it's too early to say one way or the other what all of this ends up looking like, so we might find that purer/larger samples have better properties than what was measured so far, or the discovery puts us on the trail of other RTAPS in the same class that might be better for these purposes.
(Too late for me to edit)
An Earth-sized MRI machine could image all of the remaining mineral deposits, and it coils could make for a hell of an autobahn.
In a thousand years people are gonna look back at us idiots filling balloons with helium and letting them disperse into the upper atmosphere and shake their heads at how stupid we were.
My thinking is that zero resistance through the projectile itself and through the rails would help, but you still need to make an electrical connection between the projectile and the rails. Either this is done with a plasma arc or physical contact, but either of these causes erosion of the rails even if there is no electrical resistance through the rails or projectiles. Am I missing something?
For future rail guns, they'd just have replacement rails available as they do barrels for tanks/artillery guns (that wear out after about 1000 shots afaik).
Energy storage in a superconductor is done in the form of magnetic field, a superconducting induction coil (SMES), whose density of energy storage per kilogram is highly inferior to a capacitor and a supercapacitor, which stores energy in the form electric fields, and whose density of energy storage per Kg in turn is very inferior to chemical batteries.
The magnetic fields are charged and released quicker in inductors than in capacitors (and than in chemical batteries), also the material have a longer life, and the rate of self-discharge is sightly inferior in superconducting inductors, nevertheless the density per kilogram -and to administrate such sudden energy release- limits very much the applications.
If LK99 becomes true, and is improved much (as the electrical current in the paper is limited to milliamperes range), at middle term I don't think on it happening.
If at future is achieved superconducting through nanowires, with inferior weight to batteries, may be, but in a car for example would need the added weight of metallic "magnetic shields" for health security.
IMHO, I don't see it beyond stationary applications.