<story><title>Will better superconductors transform the world?</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-better-superconductors-transform-the-world-20240509/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>px43</author><text>Better superconductors means better magnets, which means cheaper fusion.&lt;p&gt;Some modest improvements in high temperature superconductors from MIT is allowing Commonwealth Fusion Systems to scale down ITER from being a 65 billion dollar five story behemoth, to something slightly taller than the average human.&lt;p&gt;With a few more iterations, it becomes very feasible to imagine fusion reactors the size of a rice maker to power homes and vehicles, or even smaller to just have personal, wearable fusion reactors that can provide near infinite power to any gadgets we want to carry with us.&lt;p&gt;Also I really enjoy the idea of reducing giant MRI machines down to the form factor of a hula hoop. If anyone could get highly detailed MRI scans whenever they wanted, a huge amount of disease could be prevented.</text></comment>
<story><title>Will better superconductors transform the world?</title><url>https://www.quantamagazine.org/will-better-superconductors-transform-the-world-20240509/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>huppeldepup</author><text>What’s always missing around this subject is the use of superconductors as energy storage devices:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Superconducting_magnetic_ene...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tangential, high density energy storage also means things that go kaboom by intent.</text></comment>