Copper vs Superconducting Magnets
Copper magnets waste enormous power as heat and can't sustain high fields continuously. Superconducting magnets carry current losslessly — essential for a power reactor.
- Copper
- Resistive — dissipates large power as heat
- Superconducting
- Zero resistance — lossless
- For a power plant
- Superconducting is essential
- Kronos
- HTS / REBCO
Early and experimental tokamaks often used resistive copper magnets, which work but at a steep price: copper has electrical resistance, so sustaining a strong field means continuously dissipating enormous amounts of power as heat — impractical for a machine meant to produce net energy.
| Property | Superconducting / Copper |
|---|---|
| Resistance | Zero (lossless) / significant (dissipates power) |
| Steady high field | Sustained efficiently / very costly, often pulsed |
| Power-plant fit | Essential / impractical |
A commercial reactor needs magnets that hold a strong field continuously without eating the plant's output — which means superconductors. Kronos uses HTS (REBCO), whose lossless high field is what makes the whole engineering-gain equation work. See HTS vs LTS magnets for the superconductor comparison.