Presentation via Zoom By David Larbalestier, National MagLab

Title: REBCO in the Age of Fusion – what does that mean for the MagLab and for all those superconducting applications so freely discussed in 1987-1990

Host: Science Council's MagX Presentation

Discussion Leader: Tom Painter

Abstract: REBCO is the most versatile of the cuprate superconductors with the lowest superconducting anisotropy and the highest critical fields and layer critical current densities, attributes now being exploited by the startup fusion magnet efforts for making 20T at 20K magnets for compact tokamaks. Like our use of REBCO for the 32T magnet, cost was a secondary issue because no other material could enable such use, but billions were put into cuprate science and technology in the 1990-2015 period based on the belief that they could replace Cu and FE in many aspects of electrotechnology. Technically this was proven but economically the arguments always failed. Just the first prototype of the CFS magnet used over 300km of 4mm wide tape, more than 15 times all the tape bought at the MagLab for 32T and 40T. Now, as tape production scales up to thousands of km per year there are opportunities to rethink REBCO CC manufacture such that REBCO could become pervasive because much cheaper. I want to explore how this might occur and how success could be good for the MagLab.