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The Record For High-Temperature Superconductivity Has Been Smashed Again (technologyreview.com)
Chemists have found a material that can display superconducting behavior at a temperature warmer than it currently is at the North Pole. The work brings room-temperature superconductivity tantalizingly close.
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
From a report: The work comes from the lab of Mikhail Eremets and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole.
"Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
While I agree that this is a big step forward, 25,000 psi is more than "not much of a caveat". Your PC is going to gain a lot of weight when you add a pressure vessel capable of containing that safely. Then there's the additional challenge of getting wires from inside to outside without compromising the vessel. I'd like to see the hermetic connectors they use for that.
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I think you missed a few zeroes there, 170 gigapascals is around 25 million psi.
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The device used to get to this type of pressure is called a diamond anvil press/cell (see wikipedia) And no, there is no way to use such a device outside a very specialized lab.
You wrote "The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. " I apparently misread that as being a claim about energy use. My apologies.
You have nothing to apologize for. Luckyo was drooling his ignorance all over you while making an ass of himself. The Long Island superconducting cable operates at 130 kV AC and has 150 times the power capacity of the same size conventional copper conductor, which means the right of way required to run it safely is much much narrower. They're moving 574 MW through a right of way just 4 feet wide. In New York City, that's incredibly valuable because the real estate required to operate a conventional line would be dramatically more expensive. Prohibitively more expensive, in fact. To operate a conventional cable, the voltage required to carry the same amount of power is much higher, which requires a correspondingly wider right of way for safety.
The Department of Energy helped pay for it. It went live in 2008 and the Long Island Power Authority has decided to keep it permanently, even though it was intended as a demonstrator. It's still in operation today. That tells you that it's cost effective to operate. LIPA will eventually install more such lines on the island in other locations that physically can't be replaced with a conventional HVDC line of the same capacity. There isn't room for one.
Ultimately, superconducting power cables will be HVDC installations themselves. Experiments out of Japan in 2010 demonstrated that HVDC over superconductors is 10 times more efficient than HVAC over the same size lines. There are still losses in superconductors. They're very very small compared to conventional lines, but they're non-zero.