And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.
Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.
Just thinking about the possible applications for storage makes me dizzy. Fingers crossed.
most of the common examples are in-the-works or exist in some form, they just don't satisfy the 'every-person' checkbox yet.
AI? sure. Flying cars? sure. Robots? sure.
Fusion is in the works, too. Tens of billions of dollars being thrown into the ring by private capital -- and recently -- which is a pretty good indicator of 'perceived realistic' historically.
Also, it's kind of apples/oranges. We had equivalent mechanisms before the transistor, transistors just lead to extreme miniaturization of logic gates that we now enjoy. Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent.
similarly : room temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors are a new thing if proven possible.
But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out.
I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor.
Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude.
> Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.
Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities with coal (as well as some obviously differences).
But this thread isn't about coal vs nuclear.
Frankly, if you don't actually see the difference between the relative importance of superconductors vs copper wire and nuclear vs coal then I really don't think I have anything to say that will interest you. Suffice to say that nuclear didn't change the world all that much but superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Even if true I still don't think it would be in time to help us address some of the more urgent problems we are facing. Neither does nuclear. And come to think of it: if this tech is real (big if) then it will actually probably cause a revolution in nuclear as well because it would allow for nuclear power to be transmitted the world over without the non-proliferation headaches associated with shipping reactors to various countries. It wouldn't solve the waste problem (though there are some interesting reactor designs now) and it won't happen overnight but it would make a difference.
Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?
They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.
Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy).
Hardly, coal is much more expensive if you price in the externalities. We just pretend they don't exist for coal, and we staple anything that moves to nuclear.
Coal kills 25 people per TWh generated, and the actuarial cost of a death is about $10M as used by the nuclear industry, not to mention the environmental costs. That means the all-in cost of coal is much much higher than the LCOE - about 16c/kWh according to the Government of Canada. [1] The 2019 US EIA LCOE for nuclear is about 7.7c/kWh. [2]
Nuclear is cheaper than coal and costs around the same as solar/wind + storage - less, depending on the desired level of equivalence between the two. It has high up-front capital costs and a long payback period so the cost depends primarily on cost of capital. Fuel costs are $0.015/kWh to $0.00015/kWh in uranium.
There are places that get lots of cheap, reliable no-carbon power from nuclear. For instance Ontario, at about $0.10CAD/kWh ($0.075USD/kWh), delivered. [3]
[1] https://natural-resources.canada.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/fi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
[3] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
Why is that a goal? Zero-carbon electricity is a goal, so that we don't all sink. Profit isn't. If ever there were a job for taxpayer dollars, IMO, this is it.
"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
"In 2019 the US EIA revised the levelized cost of electricity from new advanced nuclear power plants going online in 2023 to be $0.0775/kWh before government subsidies, using a regulated industry 4.3% cost of capital (WACC - pre-tax 6.6%) over a 30-year cost recovery period" [old 2, sourced from new 1]
The response to you was a separate opinion on the role of government in the energy sector. After all, we've put trillions of subsidies into fossil fuels the least we could do is put money into something that solves problems instead of creating new ones. I also said I don't care whether it's public or private funds that are used to construct it.
Really nothing at that scale is built without subsidies, but the 7.7c/kWh rate was before subsidies.
Did I miss something? I thought I answered your question with that figure and its origin, it sounds like exactly what you wanted to know. I don't know which precise power plants they included but it's probably in [1].
[edit] I guess it's weird that we're so stuck on this one specific technology. What's the un-subsidized cost of oil power when the price of oil is set by OPEC, externalities aren't factored in, and every time it goes up we unload the Strategic Oil Reserve?
Coal, I mean, it's all unpriced externalities - death, environmental toll.
Solar 90% of the panels come from China, how much does the PRC subsidize the plants and materials that go into making the panels? Lithium for storage? Rare earths for wind?
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
That's not a technical issue though.
Cost efficiency of nuclear energy has actually declined over time...which, unless science is devolving, should tell you something hinky is happening.
Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disable them if a false positive happens even once and costs them money.
For this reason nuclear has a LOT of regulation and red tape. It has far more than any other kind of energy, because even though the risk of accident is low the outcome of an accident is worse than any other kind of energy except hydro. Hydro has fewer things that can go wrong that are cheaper to check however, so regulations there tend to not be as expensive.
That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail.
The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough to run, but it isn't.
Also I should mention, part of what makes them passively safe is there is a plug at the bottom that melts if the reactor overheats. This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
Let me introduce you to the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1].
What you probably meant is that none have been built commercially. That is true, but again as I mentioned, not because of their technical drawbacks but because of politics. In fact, the inventor of the light water reactor, Alvin Weinberg[2], was a strong proponent of the molten salt reactor over his own invention. So strong that he fired was from ORNL because he was claiming that light water reactors are inherently unsafe and that MSR is a better design.
Nixon ultimately sacked him because he (Nixon) chose to support LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) because it was being built in California, and in return he got political support that he needed. MSR ultimately lost due to pork-barrelling.
> This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
I mean you're shifting goalposts here. The "operator" has a specific meaning - someone controlling the reactor from the control room. They don't have access to the freeze plug during normal reactor operation.
But even if they did do what you're suggesting, the pressures inside the MSR are so low (on the order of couple of bars) that the damage would be quite limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
You need an energy source to make hydrogen (eg out of water, or you make it via fossil fuels etc). When you use up the hydrogen, you get some energy back out. A lot less energy, to be honest.
So it's equivalent to a battery. Not to an energy source.
It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it.
So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics.
We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. Instead, we humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5].
[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
[2] https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generate...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung
[5] https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-f...
So the smaller you make your reactor the hotter you'll have to make it to make it net positive. This leads to the counter intuitive result that making a much larger reactor is actually quite possibly easier than making a really small one. The rate of heat loss is much smaller for a larger reactor and so it becomes easier to sustain the reaction and to extract useful energy from it.
It is very well possible that none of the reactors currently on the drawing board and under construction are going to be working well enough to give us a sustained reaction resulting in net yield. But we're getting closer and closer to that and there is some (small) chance that I will still see this in my lifetime.
The catch is that as long as you can't get a small reactor to work getting funding for a much larger one (which you actually may be able to get to work) is going to be extremely difficult. We like to see proof before we scale up. In this case it may well be that such small scale proof can't be done or can't be done in a way that it it will convince backers that a larger scale device will work.
It's also nice when your reaction quits flinging antimatter at your containment vessel :)
I very much doubt currently known materials and structures could be used to construct a reactor 10 times the size of ITER.
Besides, what's the bathing suit name reference ? I don't get it.
Nice phrase, useful many places and I might well do that. (Unless objections are raised).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor
This was something that people said would change the world when I was in high school and it really hasn't. (For that matter, the fundamental physics is still not very well understood)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE
Liquid nitrogen is very easy to handle (ordinary thermos), liquid helium is much more expensive and harder. WHen I was in grad school the one required class was the Physics 510 lab and for that I did an experiment that involved second sound in superfluid helium and that involved cooling stuff down with liquid nitrogen first, then rolling up a huge dewar full of liquid helium, attaching a vacuum pump to get the temperature down to 2K, etc. For all that trouble you get to see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU
That said, it was a long time before really good superconducting tape for fusion reactor magnets and stuff like that became available.
The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it...
LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.
I said "It's O(n), but the constant is ridiculous in most implementations so it's usually better just to sort and then pick the kth element". The grad student friend said something that stuck with me: "Sure, but the algorithm proves it's possible to find the kth element in linear time. That was never guaranteed. Now we just need to find a better way to do it."
Random conversation that stuck with me, and they probably forgot it a moment later.
Branching off into a philosophical thought here, but I find this to be completely wrong. It was always guaranteed; logic, like physics and chemistry is not an environment that changes.
We have discovered a functioning technique which might be improved upon. What wasn’t guaranteed was that it would be found.
Biology is the root of most, perhaps all, uncertainty. After all, it is our biology that makes us imperfect observers, thinkers, and makers(but also enables us to do those things at all!).
I think this is important, because their is a significant difference in mindset between making something, and looking for something. Science is looking, technology is making. Things are always “seen” before they are “made”.
What we don't know is which we exist in.
Those are the kinds of magnetic fields the classic superconductors and the newer high-temperature superconductors can achieve.
Is LK-99 part of a larger (either known or emerging) class of materials? I'm not understanding what the lead and copper ions are doing to create internal stress, and why that leads to superconductivity.
I assume the energy lost as heat occurs due to the "current" going into the and gate having "nowhere else to go" other than to dissapate as heat?
If that's the case, simply redesigning our logic gates to have as many outputs as they have inputs, with some of these outputs feeding indirectly back to the power source without being read, seems feasible.
Not quite, it's a thermodynamic principle that applies to any way you could possibly compute AND. Basically, the laws of physics are reversible, so your computation must be reversible too. There are 4 possible inputs to an AND gate, so to be reversible there must be 4 possible outputs, one for each input. But we only want one output for the rest of our computation, so the other one dump into the environment somehow.
If we "dump the other output" back into the power source, such as the battery, does that solve the problem of not implicitly dumping it into the environment? Or is it still destroying information?
This can be worked around by introducing ancilla bits to maintain the number of states in the system, but the instant you destroy the ancilla bits (e.g. by feeding them back to the power source), you dissipate energy. The exact mechanics of this would depend on the implementation of the device you're talking about, but you'd inevitably encounter it and be unable to overcome it.
Biological systems supposedly operate at about one order of magnitude above the Landauer limit [0], i.e this is completely practical and has been happening before we even made computers... we probably wouldn't exist without being this efficient, imagine how much energy our cells would need to consume and emit as heat if it were similar to a CPU of today!
You could absolutely use superconductors for all the connecting wires, and with a little engineering it might also be good for conducting heat away from the chip die as part of the larger CPU package… it wouldn’t be a good interface material (pins for connecting to the motherboard) as you want oxidisation resistance and a level of ductility and malleability to help with making a very good electrical connection between the surfaces when they are mechanically pressed together. But overall it will have some uses, it’s just not an immediately applicable technology for the silicon chips themselves… lots of potential in circuit designs and I’m sure if someone invented a way to lay this material onto a PCB as easily as we can print copper traces on them today that inventor would get pretty rich… it’s just not likely to make much of a change to the silicon chip die itself due to the need for semiconductors to do the transistor switching …
Of course someone might have invented a superconducting transistor that I haven’t heard of and if that’s the case disregard most of what I’ve just written haha.
Turns out that some research groups have already built superconducting CPU, albeit tiny ones.
Considering how much faster super conductor logic circuits have been demonstrated to be driven [0] it might be worth the trade even with a higher fundamental limit on feature size.
A super conducting chip with far less logic could easily beat CMOS in: (1) Power performance (2) Single threaded performance (where CMOS has stalled) - but interestingly it could still compete in total throughput if the raw frequency is high enough. i.e even though there may be far less logic available compared to the latest and greatest CMOS lithography techniques - if it runs so much faster, less or simpler cores can potentially match or beat the throughput of the more parallel and specialised but slow logic available in CMOS dies.
In short, it could be like taking a step back in time to the simpler, smaller CPU days, but a huge step forward in fundamental frequency. That actually sounds like a nice trade regardless, CPUs are so insanely complex these days.
</armchair physics>
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower
I work in research, so I understand that it is very important to keep in mind the limits imposed by nature itself. Heck, I had more than one argument with idiot bosses who wanted to break the laws of physics or maths...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/new-superconductor-microprocessor-...
I don't think this actually affects the high level opcodes, i.e it's transparent, so long as the circuit implementing them somehow performs charge recovery, the high level programming can still appear to be irreversible (I don't want to think about the potential side channel attacks that causes when you want to zero some bits!).
But currently, the adiabatic chips has a bigger issue with getting to zero: their control circuitry is a bank of AWGs, each burning probably hundreds of watts at room temperature. They ideally don't produce heat in the cold zone, which is great for the cryogenic system, but if we have room temperature superconductors, that's suddenly moot.
But I can't find the original source or anything.
For some reason, there’s a contingent of people that think that by poking holes and pooh-poohing things, it gives them clout. It happens far too often in tech and I hate it. Look how often the post has “can’t” or “couldn’t”.
Instead of giving reasons why something sucks, how about being supportive and talking about why it’s awesome and what possibilities this opens up? Pro life tip: People are you are probably tired of hearing you do the same thing in conversations with you.
Impure superconductor samples often come out as a spongy mixture of superconducting and non-superconducting bits, the critical current is limited because less then 25% of the cross section is actually carrying current. When I was DIYing YBCO this is what happened most of the time. Every now and then you would get a good one.
See this patent for growing single crystals of YBCO. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6046139A/en
edit: Actually if you look at the sample picture in the paper on page 7, it looks like spongy crap. Nobel prize winning spongy crap, but still. I would expect the numbers to improve as better crystal growing methods are found.
It’s spongy grainy crap indeed… but as long as their analysis holds up to scrutiny and replication… and whoa boy do I bet there are people already trying to replicate this result as I’m typing my reply and reading the rest of the comments…. As long as the results hold up and this isn’t an abnormally low performing superconductor… i have no doubt this is going to win a Nobel prize. This has been the prize for a long time in this whole discipline, and they may have finally nailed it.
We as a species may be on the bring of a revolutionary step forward in what we can achieve in engineering and science. Better instruments and more powerful or sophisticated motors and power systems. It’s heady stuff to think it may happen in my lifetime.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
Compare with this table:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_rea...
Compared to the discovery of fire, the changes from room temperature superconductors would be a flash fire.
Maglevs are also a popular guess - safer, faster, and more power efficient ground mass transport would be a huge thing.
Maybe even magnetic rail space launches.
And, of course, military applications (the last few examples I mentioned involve acceleration of big-ish masses to surreally high velocities, which is popular approach to weaponry).
So in addition to any immediate practical applications there's also this element of cracking a famous long unsolved problem. It'd be like if we discovered definitive proof that P != NP, or a theoretical basis for FTL communications. Even with no immediate practical applications it'd still be huge news.
I wouldn't say that it was necessarily "theoretically possible," for there has never been, and there still isn't, a grand theory of how any given material's atomic/crystalline structure relates to superconductivity. In other words, with no theory of material superconductivity, it was never quite clear what's possible and what isn't. With this new material, though, we might get a lot closer to a working model, if nothing else.
Which would enable us to put a lot of solar power in the desert and move it around effectively to other places on Earth.
Again, with the right material properties it could also produce efficient storage, and that also has huge implications for electrical generation.
If you lose 20% to the grid, then build a 20% bigger solar farm.
Solar farms actually help with reversing desertification by reducing water losses from direct exposure to sunlight.
People would have suggested things like cities in the sky, looking down on things, and traversing marshland easily.
The actual main use for planes has turned out to be fast long distance travel. But we don't actually theoretically need to be up in the air to travel fast or far - in fact, had we never invented the aeroplane, we'd probably have cars or trains by now that moved as fast as present day planes do.
The revolutionary effect of new inventions is often hard to see, particularly for basic science research like superconductors.
I don't know enough to be sure on the certainty of that model, but it seems well supported. So I'd be surprised if only improving the material quality was enough to make it strong.
I’m also very curious what kind of inductors you could make for switching power supplies using superconductors.
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.
https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
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.
We live in unpleasant times.
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.
Quite a bit more than chemical, in other words, the chief problem being what happens if it quenches. Or the cables break.
And cost.
That does make for an interesting failure mode if anything should every cause a small spot on a longer conductor to reach that temperature...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zib4IV2TIg
It stays lit until the breaker goes at 3:57.
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.
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.
There's no technical impairment for doing this with current tech, and it's not clear the new tech (if it works) 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.
It would be lovely ironic if in the future we all drove ICE cars, but just fuelled by clean and carbon-neutral gasoline.
Everyone’s generation thought the world was falling apart.
But it continues to get better.
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).
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.
Also, no fusion startup I know of is using LN2 for superconductors. Liquid helium offers too much performance and quench margin with YCBO.
> As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too.
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
And each discovery can change our understanding of other things/accelerate discovery in other areas.
[0] So much as such a thing can exist
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.
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
If you could use it to make circuits, especially of a high level of integration then it might well be something much more interesting (Josephson tunneling is briefly mentioned in the article). That could theoretically give rise to very efficient switching gear and if it can be miniaturized enough to efficient CPUs and memory. This is because the typical transistor uses power mostly in the time between the transition between the 'on' state and the 'off' state, when it is acting as a resistor. If you could get rid of that resistance during the transition then you might be able to reduce the amount of power a given circuit uses, but there are still lower limits off losses that you won't be able to escape, so it will not make your CPU magically use zero energy.
Given the contents of the paper such applications are a very long way off and may in fact never happen. Let's first see (1) if it is true and (2) if it is true how well it stacks up against copper wire of the same diameter and commercially available super conductors in terms of cost and practical current carrying capability. If that's all good then this will really be a game changer.
There is also extra thick copper clad board ('heavy copper PCBs').
I'd also like to use this for antennas, transmission lines, and tuned cavities.[4] There are a lot of things you could do at VLF frequencies[5] that require long, long wires... with lots of resistance, unless you have a defense budget, the resistance eats into efficiency. Superconductors could help deal with that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_wave#Electromagne...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_radio_frequenc...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_frequency#Amateur_use
It would be super room temperature
From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current density, not just current which is meaningless (and around 300 mA).
This means you can't actually push big current through this thing (yet). You can't make a powerful magnet, and you can't make viable power lines, both applications that were the hallmark of "room temperature superconductor revolution".
Of course, maybe one or a few more tweak(s) of the material and boom, it will give high J_c and B_c. I really hope it does, it would be super cool!