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Time is running out for Britain’s embryonic superconducting electronics
industry. The industry could disappear within two years – just as the
commercial market for the superconductors is taking off – because British
research teams are too small and government funding is insufficient,
according to a report* published this week.

Nine of Britain’s top superconductivity researchers, led by Gordon Donaldson
of the University of Strathclyde, warn in the report that British research
is in a ‘desperate situation’. The team spent two weeks in the US in March,
financed by the Department of Trade and Industry’s overseas science and
technology expert mission scheme (OSTEMS), assessing research and
development into superconductors. These materials lose all their electrical
resistance when cooled below the temperature of liquid nitrogen, and so can
be made into very fast, low-power electronic circuits.

The US has the world’s largest national research programme into
superconductivity, with government spending approaching $400 million
in 1992. Japan spent nearly $140 million in 1992. In 1991 Britain
spent less than $25 million. None of the British industrial teams
‘has the critical mass of a dozen or more professional scientists required
to make real progress’, says the report. Despite this, British research has
kept up with the rest of the world. But Tony Appleton, a consultant to the
DTI, warns: ‘Unless there is more DTI funding, that situation will not
±ô²¹²õ³Ù.’

He says that electricity supply companies are already interested in buying
superconducting fault current limiters, a safety device for power
transmission lines. By the end of the decade, the world market for
superconducting products will be about $10 billion, and it could be
$200 billion by 2020. Many of the US researchers visited by the
OSTEMS team expect to be selling products within two years.

The team says that Britain should spend three years developing a
demonstration system which shows superconduc-tivity’s advantages over
conventional technology. They expect this to cost £2 million
a year. But Donaldson says it is not clear where the money would come from.
The DTI’s Advanced Technology Programme, which has put £8
million into research since 1988, has now ended.

*Superconductivity in the USA, OSTEMS Report, 1993, published by the
Institute of Physics and the Department of Trade and Industry.