>"Newer high-temperature superconductors—so called because they can superconduct at relatively balmy liquid nitrogen temperatures above 77 kelvins—were not arou

>"Newer high-temperature superconductors—so called because they can superconduct at relatively balmy liquid nitrogen temperatures above 77 kelvins—were not around when ITER was designed. But they can carry much higher currents, tantalizing fusion designers with the prospect of smaller, cheaper reactors. Yet they are brittle, persnickety materials, so “a lot of people had given up on them,” says Rod Bateman of Tokamak Energy, the U.K. startup that is also betting on the technology. “They were just too unreliable.” In the past decade, researchers have developed ways to deposit thin layers of superconducting rare-earth barium copper oxide (ReBCO) on metal tape. The tapes can be manufactured reliably in long lengths, and perform best at about 10 K. But in terms of low-temperature engineering, “10 K is a lot easier than 4 K,” says magnet engineer John Smith of General Atomics in San Diego. The ReBCO tapes can be bent but, being flat, are challenging to wind into coils, Mumgaard says. “You have to stop treating it like a wire and asking it to do the things that wire does.” Commonwealth has developed a cable with stacked layers of tape twisting like candy cane stripes. The company believes the cables can carry enough current to generate a 20-tesla field—1.5 times stronger than ITER’s—in magnet coils just a few meters across." Weird Idea: Might have future applications in warping space, like in a warp drive... (but don't ask me how that would be possible at this point in time!)