Superconductors are basically perfectly conductive wire. Wires that transfer 100% of power over arbitrary distances and that don't heat up. Obviously there are limits, you can't put arbitrary power over a hair thin filament but as long as you're under that limit you get perfect efficiency.
MRI machines can be made a lot simpler as you no longer need to use liquid nitrogen to cool the superconductors. MRI machines could end up being small and cheap.
Perfectly efficient electromagnets make a lot of problems in fusion reactors simpler, I'm not sure that room temperature superconductors make fusion reactors instantly viable but it's a big step and would reduce the energy requirements for a fusion bottle by a lot.
Basically anything involving electromagnets becomes a lot more efficient. Motors can be made smaller, generators can be made much more efficient for the weight, maglev trains can require very little power to hover. It has effects on almost every industrial process as it fundamentally changes the weight and energy efficiency of anything involving electromagnets.
One neat things would be surgical robots that can work as an MRI while also levitating a small blade in a 3D space. Challenging for sure but when you can replace complicated liquid-nitrogen cooled coils with an array of simple passive coils a lot of options open up.
Superconductors can also be used for power storage, and at room temperature that becomes a lot more viable.
A note about MRI machines: they use liquid helium, not liquid nitrogen. LN2 isn't cold enough. Being able to eliminate liquid helium would be huge, as helium is scarse and quite expensive. Its roughly 10x the cost of LN2 and only going to get more expensive.
Previous improvements in high-temperature superconductors already made it possible to build a MRI machine using LN2 instead of LHe. I think all existing operational units still use LHe, but using LN2 has been demonstrated in lab conditions, and the next generation of machines will almost certainly use it instead of helium.
It still might be worth cooling this with LN2, in many applications, assuming critical current and critical field scale up as temperature decreases as they do with other superconductors.
It takes a long time to validate new stuff for medical devices. Even if this discovery completely pans out, there will be two or three generations of MRI machines based on LN2-cooled superconductors.
They use both liquid helium and liquid nitrogen. The nitrogen is used to cool the helium. On MRI scanners that have come to market in the last few years, helium volume has been reduced at least 100x and is now only a few liters (i.e. previously >1000L and requiring frequent top off to <1L and requiring refill only after emergency/full power loss).
Superconductors are a transferring energy technology, not a storing energy technology. Although they would likely augment the efficiency of storage technologies.
> What kind of energy density could we get using it for energy storage?
Actually, not a lot. The are some very compelling uses of them for storing energy, but they are much more relevant for distribution grid stability and control than for raw energy storage.
There are people here are pushing some really non-compelling use cases (like long distance power distribution), but there are plenty of transformative ones.
(But the thing is that this one on the paper is much less useful than it could be. There is still some work on understanding why and fixing it.)
Don't forget about computer chips that do not emit heat. So much wasted power at the datacenter scale simply to keep things cool. At a personal computer level things get way more efficient, too, resulting in cheaper, smaller, quieter computing devices.
MRI machines can be made a lot simpler as you no longer need to use liquid nitrogen to cool the superconductors. MRI machines could end up being small and cheap.
Perfectly efficient electromagnets make a lot of problems in fusion reactors simpler, I'm not sure that room temperature superconductors make fusion reactors instantly viable but it's a big step and would reduce the energy requirements for a fusion bottle by a lot.
Basically anything involving electromagnets becomes a lot more efficient. Motors can be made smaller, generators can be made much more efficient for the weight, maglev trains can require very little power to hover. It has effects on almost every industrial process as it fundamentally changes the weight and energy efficiency of anything involving electromagnets.
One neat things would be surgical robots that can work as an MRI while also levitating a small blade in a 3D space. Challenging for sure but when you can replace complicated liquid-nitrogen cooled coils with an array of simple passive coils a lot of options open up.
Superconductors can also be used for power storage, and at room temperature that becomes a lot more viable.
Here's this big wikipedia page on applications of superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_...
Also on the less useful side, rail guns.