They've found a way to wind it into tapes which make fabricating magnates relatively easy - they have demonstrated world record magnetic capability with these. Fusion is one of the applications but the thing I liked about the research is that there are intermediate technology goals that they are aiming to hit which should fund everything - notably compact medical scanners.

YBCO is not new, but the production of it in the amounts and quality necessary for large superconducting magnets is still difficult. You need to produce long stretches of the material to create large magnets efficiently, and that isn't trivial.

The old superconductors typically used in this kind of magnets have been pushed to the limit already in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, ~23 Tesla is the strongest existing commercial one and this seems to be a limit for that technology. The first NMR magnets that use YBCO are expected in the next years as far as I remember, I don't think any exist yet.

Now that is interesting. I had thought YBCO was easy to fabricate given I saw some amateur do it on YouTube, but I do accept they had quality control issues — important on large scale production.

The way I’m reading the article they’re talking about a new superconductor where YBCO is one of the materials used. English isn’t my first language though so I could be off base here.