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New Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K
myrrdyn writes to tell us that a new superconductivity record high of 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F) has been recorded. According to the article this is the first time a superconductive state has been observed at a temperature comparable to a household freezer. "This achievement was accomplished by combining two previously successful structure types: the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223. The chemical elements remain the same as those used in the 242K material announced in May 2009. The host compound has the formula (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy and is believed to attain 254K superconductivity when a 9223 structure forms"
If you have some time to read, I'll explain my vision for the future: If we put solar panels across the desert, we'll need to have a transmission line to get it to places where people live. I reason that a super conductive line would do the trick. It is costly in terms of energy to cool the lines, but if you have an excess of energy to begin with, it could actually cost less than the loss of power you get in copper lines. Basically you just leech off the super conductive line for cooling.
The demand for energy will only increase with time regardless of conservation efforts, and this isn't a bad thing. The more energy we have, the cheaper transportation and food is which in turn lets people have more money for charity to help people who need food. So creating a surplus of energy soon could have worldwide benefits instead of just keeping up with demand.
I have a second vision that goes along with solar in the desert and superconductivity lines. It is tidal/solar near the coast, to fuel up hydrogen tanker trucks. These hydrogen tanker trucks could run on hydrogen themselves and take the energy inland. In the same processing plant that creates the hydrogen from electricity, they could also produce clean water for countries that need that as a critical resource.
Both of these visions takes a little bit of technological advancement, but not too much from what we have. My key question would be: Would this new superconductor be possible to mass produce, and could it be used as a new transmission line?
God spoke to me.
If this structure is anything like the other high temp superconductor, it is a ceramic, which can hardly be used as a cable conductor.
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Wow. I'll bet the guys at Cern are feeling pretty foolish right about now.
No, "high temperature" superconductors cannot be used in magnets. That's why they're using liquid helium (or was it liquid hydrogen?) instead of the much cheaper liquid nitrogen -- all the superconductors that work at the warmer liquid nitrogen temperatures will stop working in a moderately strong magnetic field.
From TFA:
This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research.
Amazingly cool. (No pun intended.)
Reaching room temperature super conduction would bring huge benefits to modern day technology. Power usage of chips would plummet to almost nothing and allow a brand new generation of processors. Amongst several other very useful things.
I thought most energy losses in chips were in the actual transistors rather than in the wires? Now, if they find a way to make this stuff switch very quickly between "superconducting" and "very good insulator"...
...it is a ceramic, which can hardly be used as a cable conductor.
You mean except for the ceramic cables that are already in use? I think your "information" may be a wee bit out of date.
it will take a lot of hard (nobel prize winning) effort
Yeah, but Nobel prize winning effort isn't what it used to be.
What is "the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223?"
9212/2212C and 1223 are structure names. Would you like an introductory crystallography text with your summary next time? It would, after all, save you the onerous effort of following the article link.
And I don't believe there's an element known as Oy.
O-sub-y, indicating an indefinite ratio of oxygen.
...makes you think, doesn't it?
You want me to believe a wildly high superconductor Tc claim using a link to a shady website that looks like it was designed in 1996, without any link to a paper or an author, without any reference to where the discovery was made, without any notes about secondary confirmation, without any other reference in the media except one lamo blog and without any real formal publication at all? Here's what every physicist reading this article right now is thinking: STFU. If you get a near room temp Tc superconductor working, you better be on the front page of a rushed to print edition of Nature that someone just ran down the hall to shove in my hand, or I'm not even going to give you the time of day.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
What is "the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223?" And I don't believe there's an element known as Oy.
When combined with the element Vey, it forms Exasperatium.
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"254K should be warm enough for anyone"
Alas, as others have pointed out upthread, the high-temp superconductors don't work well for magnets. All superconducting materials lose their superconductivity at a certain magnetic field-strength threshold; for high-Tc materials, that threshold is much lower than it is for "conventional" superconductors.
Even if that weren't an issue, the ceramic materials are generally too brittle to stand up to the mechanical forces inside a high-field magnet coil.
Our lab has experimented with high-Tc superconducting probes for MRI. Even though they're high-Tc, we still end up cooling them to the liquid-helium range.
In David Letterman's bedroom, this is above room temperature.
Fixed.
This achievement was accomplished by combining two previously successful structure types: the upper part of a 9212/2212C and the lower part of a 1223. The chemical elements remain the same as those used in the 242K material announced in May 2009. The host compound has the formula (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy and is believed to attain 254K superconductivity when a 9223 structure forms
Ok. I now physics and chemistry. But WHAT? Those numbers make no sense, and is about the most useless quote ever quoted on slashdot. And that's saying something.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
another 1/3 is wasted powering computers used to read slashdot
Sigh... I know this is Slashdot, but how about reaching as far as your keyboard and throwing a few obvious keywords at Google?
From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission:
"Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995"
Re-sigh.
Those damns laws of thermodynamics say large scale plants are inherently more efficient even accounting for transmission losses. Reduce transmission losses by a couple more percent and it's like you built a couple more large scale plants. Oh and using cheap land to generate electricity for high value land also seems like a no-brainer (seriously, would you build local generation in lower Manhattan?)
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Where's the bullshit tag?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
It it wasn't obvious before, this "no patents" sentence should have made it obvious to you that the guy is a crackpot. This guy is making materials with Tc 100K higher than the rest of the world and he publishes on his own website instead of Nature and Science? Come on -- if any of his previously claimed discoveries had any grain of truth in them he'd have won an immediate Nobel prize; this would be far more important than the CCD.
You seem to know what you're talking about, care to clue the rest of us in as to whether the link is at all plausible? Given the nature of the source, I have difficulty believing so.
depends on the power generation source. If we can make a stable fusion system that fails safe then yes. Pebble bed fission isn't bad. in fact on or two per 1 million people would stabilize the power grid.
The big problem with the power grid is that it is a really simple target. The 2003 blackout of the north east USA, was testament to the fact that one little screw up and the whole thing shuts down in beautiful cascading failures. a targeted set of attacks at key points at the right time of the year could kill millions with only a handful of targets. and I am not talking about destroying any nuclear plant, just the right transmission towers in the right sequence and suddenly the north east of the USA, some 40 million people are without heat and electricity for a month. Target for a second attack for the north west, shortly afterwards, and then rolling blackouts in the south and no one will be able to fix it for a year. 20 maybe 30 bombs around the country and the USA is worthless for the next couple of years.
partial local generation is the only viable long term solution to our future power needs. Big plants will be needed, but small plants will save lives. Even partial solar and wind generation in each region would be enough to help.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I actually noticed the original source research on the web a couple of months ago, and it should be mentioned that what these guys are creating is not a bulk material that you can pop into a freezer and levitate magnets over or whatever.
Their strategy is to produce a mix of many different variations of their target substance by carefully crystallizing it so that slightly different ratios of the constituent elements turn up in small crystals that are a part of a larger aggregate. They then test the conductivity of the mix as they lower the temperature. If any one crystal superconducts, then they observe a small drop in the conductivity graph at that temperature. With complex mixes, you get multiple drops, at different temperatures. They pick the highest temperature at which they observed a drop, and they try to isolate the crystal.
This method is very clever because it lets experimenters test a large number of related compounds 'in parallel', but what it doesn't do is provide a method for actually making bulk quantities of a discovered compound. It's almost like those mathematical proofs, where you can show that a solution exists, you just can't actually determine what it is. In this case, making significant quantities of the pure superconductor might be quite challenging, possibly harder than finding it in the first place.
On the other hand, once they do succeed, we'll have superconductors within the temperature range achievable with solid-state chillers like the Peltier Coolers familiar to overclockers. That's big. If the superconductors have decent max current limits, expect superconducting power-electronics to be commercially available in 15 to 20 years.
Throwing the phrase "Laws of Thermodynamics" in front of your argument does not make your point true. There is nothing in the "Laws of Thermodynamics" that say a large plant are inherently more efficient than a small one. The statement is complete absurd.
Alas, there's a big gap between knowing enough to snipe at an AC and knowing enough to evaluate the claim itself. Sorry...
Uh, yes it does, smaller plants have more surface area per volume so they will lose more energy to an area of less heat (ie the environment). As another person pointed out this scaling only works so far in practice, but that's at the high end of the current generation facility size.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
My PhD thesis was on studies of these materials. Some things the guy says make it sound like he has some bit of a clue (like the fact that such materials are indeed very sensitive to water). other things he says make him a crackpot (his webpage for instance says: "Since outer space is full of superconducting elements and compounds, I think they could help explain the increasing expansion rate of the universe (through strong diamagnetism).").
Making high purity materials like these takes big expensive furnaces and people who know how to use them (very few in the entire world). The method he describes is unsuitable for making decent single crystals and so his samples will not yield much meaningful bulk information. Working with stuff like Tl is tough because it is so toxic and so making these crystals is doubly difficult, especially in the US with so many safety regulations. Just on that basis alone, it is hard to believe he has the material he says he does. When he says "The volume fraction of this material is very low." it is a huge red flag that he knows not what his sample is. The research community has been all about getting purity up over the last couple of decades and many results with less pure samples did not hold up to these refinements.
As far as physics goes, there is much research out there suggesting that some superconductivity survives in established cuprates above bulk T_c. Even besides that, the electronic states in these materials above T_c are screwed up. My research showed some very interesting electronic phases directly. Thus, a small jump in a poorly evaluated variable may be there but cannot necessarily be taken seriously as an indication of bulk superconducting order even if it is measured carefully.
On top of which, his graphs are your typical crank type graphs. What am I supposed to conclude from voltage vs. temperature? How is that related to resistivity? What are the units? If the material is just synthesized, then how is crystal structure already known? Which beamline was used?
In short, wake me up when one of three or four reputable sample growers (BSCCO crystals are mostly grown in Japan btw, and Tl stuff used to be grown in Russia a lot, from what I heard because of lack of safety oversight there) makes a good crystal and shows something interesting going on.
Not really. In a typical power plant most of the heat comes from cooling the waste steam and turning it back into water, to be recycled back into the loop. In a gas turbine, the atmosphere has to be a sink for the exhaust heat. For example, locally we have a nuclear power plant which generates 800MWe per reactor, providing our regional base-load. The two reactors generate, as I recall, around 950MW-980MW thermal each. So, around 150MW of heat, per reactor, is dumped into the river. 85% efficiency, done on a large scale... (don't hold me to these numbers; I can't find a reference with the thermal spec right now -- but I believe that the numbers I've given are close.)
You're reading that chart wrong.
27% of all energy used is rejected as part of the electric generation process, which by the chart looks to be more than 68% of all energy actually used to produce electricity. Unless those numbers are quads, in which case the percentages are pretty close since the chart represents nearly 100 quads anyway.
That figure includes, presumably, waste heat, coupling losses, overproduction, transmission losses (not necessarily in that order, but waste heat is the lion's share).. It doesn't go into detail.
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People really need to get past this "kills birds" thing. There was ONE specific wind setup that used high speed mills in an area filled with birds that YES killed lots of birds. And bats too as I recall. Newer mills spin more slowly and while tip speed is quite high birds avoid them, they can see them spinning. A number I've seen quoted is something like 1-2 birds per YEAR per big mill.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/common_misconce.php
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~insrisg/nature/nw04/0509Windmills.htm
Anyway, the problem isn't nearly as severe as opponents would like you to believe, not with larger mills anyway. It will be interesting to see how the larger mills fare long term. Your point stands though, none of this removes the need for power transmission. Generation that isn't constant is especially going to require the need to shuffle power all over the place.
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Quite the contrary. High temperature superconductors can withstand stronger magnetic fields than low temperature ones. The reason you still use liquid helium to cool them is that it allows even greater field strengths. Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
Add to that that a lot of the long lead time stuff, has off line, and even warehoused spares. As for kill millions comment in GP? Please.. Power failures are a nuisance, and are not all that rare. Anyone that needs power has backup generators (even by lab does). Its going to be hard work to kill even a few people.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Studies here in Denmark have shown that birds adjust their route ~200 m from the mill. It has also shown that the high voltage cables connecting the windmill to the grid kill many more birds than windmills, even windows kill more birds than windmills. There are examples of Falcons nesting and breeding on windmills here.
The only known wind mill farm with a lot of bird killings is in the altamont pass where a huge number of small windmills have been placed in the middle of a raptor hunting ground. Ensuring that the birds are preoccupied with their prey and don't have time to look for moving obstacles.
Well, when Ike visited houston a while back, it took over two weeks to restore power, and that involved bringing in additional power line crews from 2000km away. The problem was not just downed power lines, a lot of transformers had to be replaced as well. And while linemen from Ohio were in Houston, Ohio wound up having some serious electirical problems as well (more fallout from Ike I believe) - which of course were harder to fix because so many of the personnel and materials that would normally be restoring the power in Ohio were down in Texas.
So, a determined an intelligently planned series of attacks on the power grid in geographically separated areas could take a lot longer to recover from - especially when the long lead spares for areas in Target B had already been shipped corsscountry to Target A. Power companies keep enough spares to handle a certaiun level of damage, beyond that, they assumption is they will be able to acquire any additional from other regions till replacements can be manufactured.
But, doing that kind of damage would probably require more than 20 nutjobs armed with boxcutters - or even 20 highly trained professional saboteurs. - Unless Tom Clancy was doing the planning :)
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