The idea of a superconductor is that it doesn't lose any of its electrical throughput. If you can do that over long distances then you can transfer power from anywhere to anywhere relatively cheaply and easily.

That's the idea anyway.

The short version for LK-99 is that it is probably nothing.

The reports in question date back over 15 years. The only thing that is new is that they were leaked online. A number of institutions within Korea (which is where they were first done) have come out and said that 'at best, they're flawed.'

None of the tests have ever been replicated, even by the team that did the original report.

So there's probably nothing here.

Its just that its getting a bit of fresh air all of a sudden.

If you want to bet on Superconductors, I welcome you do do it. It is one of the material science's breakthroughs that we need if the green transition is really going to stick.

One of the problems we have with the green transition is that you can generate a lot of solar in the Southwest and a lot of wind in the Great Plains, but that's not where most of the American population lives.

Even in the United States where people live "only" a couple thousand miles away from those zones, that is much better than you've got in say, Europe, where you have to go to the Great Eurasian Step for wind, and into the Sahara for Solar.

If you can solve the superconductor and transmission problem, great.

There's also another issue.

In the United States the loose rule of thumb is that if you transport power about 500 miles, it costs almost as much to do that transmission (because of the loss) as it does to generate that power in the first place. So you're generally not going to send electricity very far.

What that means is that in the United States is that most electrical utilities are local. Each town and each county has their own. There are very few large utilities in the United States.

If you want to make solar and wind work at scale, you either need larger and larger entities, or you need the ability to transfer power across jurisdictional lines, especially state and grid boundaries.

Superconductors would in theory allow us to do that technically, but we still need the legal structure to do it.

Now, you can do high voltage lines, which will double, triple, maybe quadruple the distance you can send power in an economically viable matter. But until you can cross the jurisdictional boundaries it doesn't really matter.

So what we need now, even before we get superconductors, is multiple acts of Congress to break down the legal jurisdictions to allow power to be sent large distances.

As soon as Congress does that, a number of states will sue. Because, right now this has been a local and state legal prerogative.

So we need a significant legal overhaul before we can really do the green transition, even if we did have superconductors.

So I'd say start now.

Get the laws changed.

And then hopefully we can have that physical science breakthrough that is necessary to do this over long distances and at scale.