
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 19, 1995                   TAG: 9504200053
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SUPERCONDUCTING GAIN REPORTED

The dream of manufacturing cables capable of conducting huge electrical currents without resistance and at relatively high temperatures has come closer to realization because of a new technology unveiled Tuesday by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, scientists there said.

If the technology lives up to its promise, the scientists said, superconducting power lines, magnetically levitated trains, superconducting electricity storage rings and many other imagined marvels at last will become feasible.

The claim by Los Alamos is based on a new superconducting tape, invented at the federal laboratory, that not only loses its resistance to electricity at a much higher temperature than do established superconductors but also can carry more than 1 million amperes of current per square centimeter of cross section. (By comparison, ordinary copper wire of the same thickness carries less than 800 amperes.)

Moreover, the new tape, unlike other high-temperature superconductor formulations, is flexible. It can be wrapped tightly around objects as thin as a soda straw, the Los Alamos scientists said, speaking at a meeting of the Materials Research Society in San Francisco.

Among possible uses for the new tape in the near future, said Dr. Dean E. Peterson, director of the laboratory's Superconductivity Technology Center, are highly efficient motors and very small magnetic resonance imaging machines to replace some of the giant MRI scanners used by hospitals.

Further, it at last may be economically feasible to build superconducting power lines that would save enormous amounts of otherwise wasted electrical energy, Peterson said.

Although Los Alamos has been working on superconducting tape for the last year, Peterson said, the breakthrough reported Tuesday was achieved only during the last month. The laboratory, which is operated by the federal Department of Energy, hopes to attract the interest of manufacturers in cooperative commercial ventures.

by CNB