About a year ago, on another website where I sometimes write, someone asked me a question about the fascinating metal europium that I could not, in fact, answer. So I did what I always do when I don't know something, I went to the library to find out what I could about the topic.
Mostly I was interested in the chemistry of Europium's two main fluorides and intermetallic fluoride complexes, but I learned lots of other things about europium that had nothing to do with my original interest.
Beginning in the early 1970's and extending out through much of the remaining century, there was broad interest in thin films consisting of a mixture of europium difluoride and europium sulfide in connection with superconductivity. Europium sulfide has a very high value for something known as the Verdet constant (which is actually not a constant, but a function) meaning that it can be used to construct devices known as optical isolators. This effect is useful in studying superconductors.
Maybe you couldn't care less about this gobbleygook, but thinking about all of this troubled me deeply for what it says about YBCO and humanity.
YBCO?
In the early 1990's I went to a lecture where as scientist poured liquid nitrogen all over a piece of ceramic disk, applied an electric current to it, and made it hover above a magnet.
It was very cool indeed. When the ceramic warmed in the air for less than a minute, it suddenly stopped hovering and fell.
The material in question was YBCO, which is an abbreviation for Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide, which is a material that is known as a type II superconductor, a rather mysterious material in which electricity can flow - in theory infinitely - without resistance, i.e. without any energy losses whatsoever.
Almost any metal can be superconducting at a low enough temperature, but the problem is that almost all metals require temperatures that are very close to absolute zero, temperatures that can only be obtained via access to liquid helium.
Superconductivity is already of commercial importance. The important chemical research tool nuclear magnetic resonance uses superconducting magnets, since a permanent powerful current operated in a loop produces a very strong magnetic field. The magnetic fields are so strong that if one goes near them and forgets to remove one's wallet, all of the credit cards and ATM cards one holds will be demagnetized and will not work in reading devices. This is also true of MRI devices, which operate on the same principal as NMRs. Most commercial superconducting magnets today use an alloy of the somewhat rare metals titanium and niobium with a small amount of common tin as the electrical loop. This is immersed in a bath of liquid helium, which is itself insulated from the outside by a bath of liquid nitrogen. The niobium-titanium-tin alloy has an especially high transition temperature, the temperature above which superconductivity disappears, which is 18.5K, or 18.5 degrees above absolute zero on the celcius/kelvin scale. This is almost, but not quite, the boiling point of liquid hydrogen, which is 20K.
Since obtaining cyrogenic temperatures this low requires, among other things, access to helium and the investment of significant energy, an MRI or NMR device is really the largest device possible to exploit superconductivity, and in fact, they are not really practical on a larger scale.
Enter YBCO. The transition temperature of YBCO, which was discovered in 1987, is a remarkable 93K, which is actually higher than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, and 75K higher than the commercial product now widely in use.
Moreover liquid nitrogen is much cheaper and easier to obtain than liquid helium.
This lead, in 1987, to people claiming that "we may have, soon, transmission wires that carry electricity all around the country with no losses," thus saving huge amounts of energy. People spoke of underground superconducting cables within pipes of liquid nitrogen, that could carry wind energy from North Dakota to New York at low costs, and solar power from Arizona to Maine. What was envisioned was also a conservation nirvana - about 10% of US electricity goes to transmission losses and the grid is frequently over taxed, leading to fears (sometimes realized) of high voltage transmission lines melting.
I sorta believed that we would have superconducting transmission lines within my lifetime myself. I was very niave, and more than a little credulous in those days.
It, um, didn't happen.
Today, some 23 years after the discovery of YBCO, it remains largely a laboratory curiousity, with - to my knowledge - almost no commercial importance whatsoever. The reasons were clear from the beginning - YBCO is a ceramic, not a metal, and nearly impossible to form into wires. Moreover the current density that it can carry is very low. Attempts to increase the current beyond certain limits causes the material to degrade and lose its superconductivity.
People assumed of course, that these difficulties could be technically overcome, or that a similar material with superior properties would be soon discovered.
It, um, didn't happen.
And this is what is troubling, if not to you the reader, then to me the writer. Faith that this sort of thing was possible even if it was not practical probably produced unjustified complacency in more than one person, a feeling that no difficult choices needed to be made about energy, because a little more research and development would bring a nirvana soon.
It would be fine, of course, if this were a one time deal, but, it's um, not.
You can usually get lots of recommends on this website by referring to anyone of a thousand "solar breakthroughs" that have taken place over the last few decades, that would lead to "grid parity" for solar energy.
The reality is that after the expenditure of billions and billions and billions of euros, dollars, yen, yuan and pesos, the entire solar industry on the entire planet does not produce as much energy as two large scale nuclear reactors, or dangerous coal plants, or dangerous gas plants, which is even worse when one considers that none of the former require inherent - and expensive - redundant systems to back them up, almost always dangerous gas plants.
There is nowhere on earth that solar energy has grid parity. Without huge subsidies - subsidies that are being cut in many places around the world, subsidies that represent a regressive tax that impacts the poor while enriching the rich - the solar industry would collapse in a New York second.
It's, um, worse than that, since the rate of climate change - which may derive more than we think from unjustified faith in superconducting transmission lines, solar prices falling, and reliable wind power - has not been impacted in any way. The rate of deterioration of Earth's atmosphere is now actually much higher than it was in 1987.
The fact is, that if we cannot face the fact that nothing magical is going to come along to save our asses, our asses will be lost. What we have now, what works on scale may prove to be the best we will ever have, since if the shit hits the fan - whether I like it or not - public investment in science and education will decrease and not increase.
Look around. It's already happening.
Have a nice day tomorrow morning.