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?"
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.