Raptor On A Bicycle

I should be shot for incompetence. I am so bad at my job. The tasks keep piling up and the deadlines keep getting closer and after two weeks it feels like I’m no closer to accomplishing my goal of finishing these tests. It’s not just one goddamn thing after another, it’s everything, all at once, and I’m just a very mediocre at best person trying to make these electronics do what they’re supposed to do. No wonder I have no passion for what I do outside of work, unlike everyone else here who works in tech, and the only answer I can find is that I’m a weak ass bitch who can’t stand even the easiest job she’s had so far.

can anyone explain to me why the new superconductor news is so exciting? I don't often read about or deal with the physical sciences so I'm a bit clueless there.

I gather this is very Cool and Exciting but I don't fundamentally appreciate why

stolen from Alex Kaplan on twitter

Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don't think people fully grasp the implications of an ambient temperature / pressure superconductor. Here's how it could totally change our lives.

1. 100 billion kWh of electricity are wasted on transmission losses each year in the US alone. That's equivalent to 3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7. Superconductivity enables lossless electricity transmission at high voltages and currents.
2. According to the authors, the [superconducting] LK-99 material can be prepared in about 34 hrs with extremely basic lab equipment (a mortar & pestle, basic vacuum, and furnace). These results could replicate within days-weeks.

3. Nuclear fusion reactors rely on superconductors for plasma confinement. Modern designs use RBCO/YBCO superconductors cooled with LN2 or Liquid He, creating a huge temperature gradient and challenging operation. Ambient superconductors enable a whole host of new reactor designs.
4. Quantum computers use superconductors to preserve coherence in qubits. Small changes in temperature and pressure can cause the entire QC to fail during operation. Imagine a room temperature quantum computer on your desktop - now possible.
5. Superconductors might be the best batteries out there. Simply inject a current and keep it in the coil until you need it. Previously, too costly to maintain. Now, totally feasible.
6. Your iPhone [will overheat slower] when playing subway surfer with a youtube video in the corner anymore! [More] efficient computer chips [including CPUs, GPUs, RAM etc.] will have 0 resistive losses [and therefore a bit lower power consumption] during operation with superconductors. [Correction: This will make them a bit more effective, but they will still consume a lot of power, at least for now.]
7. And, the common ones: super-cheap MRI machines, MagLev trains everywhere, and a super efficient electric grid. Basically, this:

8. I cannot contain my excitement. It feels like January of 2020 with a huge wave coming that no one realizes yet, but in a much better way. What a time to be alive!! Check out the original paper:

[Do note that whether this is legit is still unclear, so take this with a grain of salt, but if we really get room-temperature superconductors this is absolutely huge.]

I’m pessimistic about this, even if it is true.
Why?

Superconductors are bombs.

They’re fantastic at storing current but they have a little thing called a critical current density. You can only put so much current into one before it stops being superconducting. And electrical currents don’t just stop. It will generate more or less whatever voltage is necessary for the current to dissipate into heat, and then, of course, the entire superconductor is superconducting no longer. If you’ve seen people making sparks with flyback converters from CRTs or made out of microwave transformers, picture something similar, but a lot bigger.

So if the superconductor cracks or gets overloaded with current, it can explode.

Naturally, existing commercial superconducting systems either come nowhere close to this limit, or have failsafes up the wazoo, like multiple redundant coils and big shunt resistors that can absorb the current without melting anything or blowing anyone up, but I don’t trust any failsafe to be 100% effective, especially in an accident. Oh, and they can always be disabled if you try hard enough.

Battery fires are scary, but at least a Tesla doesn’t contain as much energy as a normal gas tank, and at least gasoline needs air and time to burn.

And lastly, I think the state would be a little concerned about people making off with the stuff from construction sites, so the material could potentially be highly regulated. Not to mention how horribly expensive it would be to re-wire a major transmission corridor.

Big magnets of all sorts would still be cool, though, for everything from MRIs you can sit down in, to electric motors and generators for hybrid-electric planes and cars, to particle accelerators, to electric rockets, to frighteningly powerful free-electron lasers, to giving the folks at ITER a very hectic bunch of meetings…