Italia leads the world with superconducting cable

Italia is at the forefront, worldwide, in the production of superconductive cables for use in industrial applications and for transmitting renewable energy. This is confirmed, indirectly, by a recently published study in Nature, the world's most important scientific journal, which states that MgB2 technology (magnesium diboride, that of superconducting wires) is the best from a cost-benefit standpoint for creating infrastructures for transporting energy and liquid hydrogen over long distances. The latter, moreover, cools the superconductor, allowing the passage of electrons and eliminating losses and dispersions. The Nature study was carried out by Chinese universities and research institutes as well as the University of Cambridge and compared MgB2, which was found to be the best, with Bscco (copper, calcium, strontium and bismuth oxide) and Ybco (yttrium, barium and copper oxide).

Today, there are very few companies in the world capable of producing MgB2 wires: they can be counted on the fingers of one hand in the USA, South Korea, Japan, China and Italia. The only company, however, that has so far been able to boast a patented superconductor production process suitable for the manufacture of flexible cables (inside which superconducting wires run) for the transmission of energy through industrial processes, is Italian. It is the Ligurian company Asg (owned by the Malacalza family) which, not by chance, has already supplied this technology to CERN, where numerous cables have been produced, and are currently operational, that will power the Lhc (Large hadron collider) particle accelerator, in its upgrade called Hilumi.

But Asg is also collaborating with the Infn (National Institute of Nuclear Physics): together they are developing a superconducting cable with a power rating of 1 gigawatt (potentially capable of transporting the energy produced by a nuclear power plant in just a few centimetres in diameter), which is currently being tested at the Asg plant in Genoa and is being installed at an Infn facility in Salerno.

Antonio Zoccoli, president of Infn, confirms the leading position that Italia, and therefore Europe, has in this sector. 'Yes,' says the physicist, 'we are ahead. But we are so for a very precise reason, because we have, by now, a tradition in this field. Infn and Asg have been working on superconductivity for many years, and the Ligurian company has supplied a third of the magnets to Lhc, is working with Iter (the project that aims to achieve clean nuclear energy), on the Dtt (Divertor tokamak test, the Enea energy and fusion project in Italia) and so on; all thanks also to the experience it has gained together with us'.

Asg, he continues, 'uses a cable while many others use wires; what Asg has done is to be able to industrialise this technology. Now, therefore, it is easier to produce a cable that can be used very quickly. We have moved from basic research to industrial research'.