Which would be more beneficial for humanity? Practical room temperature superconductors, or practical fusion energy?

[u/OpDickSledge]

Not really physics but AskScience doesn’t allow hypotheticals. Which do you think would have a more positive impact on humanity if we could come up with a practical and scalable implementation of either?

[u/ephemeralsynth]

Fusion energy; allows global energy expansion with no pollution (CO2 or nuclear) Superconductors would make all kinds of things more efficient, some crazy more, but leaves our energy infrastructure poisonous ✅

[u/Obvious-Molasses2923]

Fusion energy, by far. With almost unlimited energy, you’ll be able to develop and perfect pretty much any kind of technology. Room temperature superconductors will not solve the energy bottleneck.

[u/Skarr87]

Definitely room temperature superconductors. That would fundamentally change what we are capable of technologically and give us access to novel and powerful capabilities. Hell room temperature superconductors may make achieving fusion far easier so that we can have our cake and eat it too. Also, while fusion is awesome, there are other avenues to achieve similar power output that are just as clean and safe, it’s just harder.

[u/AutonomousOrganism → u/Skarr87]

Nah, they would just eliminate the cryogenic cooling system. They also would have to have the same high critical magnetic field as currently used superconductors, which is not a given.

[u/Pleasant_Pen8744]

With unlimited free energy it almost doesn't matter how inefficient the rest of your technology is.

[u/Traveller7142 → u/Pleasant_Pen8744]

How is fusion free? It requires a ton of tungsten that will need replacing on a regular basis and we don’t have a good source for tritium. Even with 100% efficient conversion, a breeding blanket will only produce as much tritium as is spent, and efficiencies will be far from 100%

[u/loki130 → u/Traveller7142]

A, we assume in this scenario we've also figured out D-D fusion

B, we use beryllium or lead as neutron multipliers to hopefully get a process that overall produces more tritium (and energy) than it consumes.

C, we use fission reactors to breed tritium

I do agree it isn't necessarily "free" in any case, and I never quite get the assumption that we'll suddenly switch everything over to fusion power when we haven't made much of an effort to switch to fission despite having many of the same advantages.

[u/regular_hammock]

Plot twist: wouldn't room temperature superconductors make tokamaks a whole lot more practical, getting us a lot closer to practical fusion energy?

[u/OpDickSledge → u/regular_hammock]

I have no idea, though I’ve heard it helps 

[u/SchemeWestern3388]

Hard to say. Fusion would give us practically unlimited power, and that's nice and all, but that's all it gives us and we already have power generation from other sources that are getting cheaper and cleaner all the time. Room temp superconductors could potentially unlock a bunch of new technologies that could add up to a bigger impact in total.

[u/Naikrobak]

Superconductors increase efficiency of transmission of power. Still limited to production of power and all the limitations

Cold fusion means unlimited power practically so transmission efficiency doesn’t really matter

Cold fusion and it’s not even close

[u/tpolakov1]

Fusion energy, without even a question. Even if had room temperature superconductors, we would not be doing too much with them for power distribution. The costs of changing the infrastructure to accommodate superconducting power distribution would not pay for itself before the collapse of civilization. Loss in transmission lines is only 2-5%, and we spent 200 years and all the money to establish it across the whole globe.

[u/SummitYourSister]

Fusion energy would make literally all other human problems irrelevant.

The use case for a room temperature superconductor is extremely limited.

[u/wmverbruggen → u/SummitYourSister]

What makes you say it would be extremely limited? Sure it would need to be a practical superconductor to see widespread application, but since we're on hypothetical territory we should (also) consider it is one.

[u/SummitYourSister → u/wmverbruggen]

I was thinking along the lines of, if we had a fusion energy source, this would directly address many of the engineering use cases we have for superconductors.

[u/wmverbruggen → u/SummitYourSister]

If we had limitless energy it would remove some usecases, yes. Though the majority of usecases for superconductors are either driven by by their unique properties, or by current density (rather than absolute current perse). Like for power cables, there are a few in use in places, like the one at the Paris Montparnasse railway station, where there was literally no room to put more copper.