The Superconductor Bottleneck Standing Between Us and Commercial Fusion

High-temperature superconductors (HTS) are looking like they will become one of the most important materials in the energy transition. In this episode of Fusion Forward, we sit down with Sergey Samoilenkov, Director of Strategy and Business Development at Faraday Factory Japan, to trace the story of HTS from the pioneering experiments conducted at IBM’s Zurich laboratory in the 1980s to its role as a critical input for commercial fusion today. We cover: The 1986 discovery that broke the "rules" of superconductivity and the Nobel Prize that followed Why HTS wire production has grown roughly 10x every five to seven years, and what that means for the 2030s How fusion companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems helped turn HTS demand into a real global market How HTS could cut copper and rare-earth demand by a factor of 10 or more in cables, magnets, and transformers Applications beyond fusion from MRI machines and mining to electric aviation and superconducting magnets already in space What Sergey expects over the next decade, including some applications nobody is talking about yet If you want to understand why this ceramic might reshape how we generate and move electricity, then this conversation is an intro to a technology that's been 30 years in the making and is only now hitting its stride. About the Guest Sergey Samoilenkov is Director of Strategy and Business Development at Faraday Factory Japan, a leading manufacturer of high-temperature superconducting wire. He has worked in the superconductivity field since his university years, spanning experimental research in the 1990s through the commercialization of early HTS wire products in the 2000s. Today he works at the intersection of HTS materials science and the industries that depend on them.