LK-99: Team of Southeast University observed zero resistance below 110 K

I agree that 1) is not discarded, it's never discarded. From scam to honest mistakes, sloppy handling, weird unexpected things, ... I'm just saying that if I has to guess, it's probably not 1).

There is middle ground. They may have discovered a new kind of (not room temperature) superconductor that is an achievement. It's good to publish a few papers, but we would not be discussing it all week.

Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). That's not room temperature unless you live in Antarctica and forgot to close the window. But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

Some potential applications for disruption:

Sub-sea cables that are the size of current fiber-optic bundles, which can transmit terawatts of energy with minimal/no losses. The bottom of the ocean is, ironically, at much higher pressure than atmosphere and would actually help increase the tolerances for superconductivity. This means: areas that have abundant power resources can export it with minimal infrastructure costs. Installing the transmission lines in this manner would be orders of magnitude cheaper than current high voltage DC transmission, and could likely bridge entire continents together. The #1 hold back on offshore wind is getting the energy from the farm to the onshore landing point. The energy loss and step-up/step-down transformers, with maintenance on those in kind, can be 30-40% of the project cost. You can also eliminate expensive and inefficient transformers on both ends since you can leave the voltage at generation-levels vs stepping it up to hundreds of thousands of volts in order to transmit it, which adds a lot of complexity. Under-utilized Hydroelectric capacity in northern Quebec could power Southern US states.

The carry on from this in terms of the reduction in required infrastructure for power transmission and delivery is massive. Think of all the copper and aluminum required today to build huge transformers, step up and step down electricity, and get it from the generation plants to your home or business. You could effectively power an entire household on a cable the size of a fishing line compared to cables the size of a sharpie.

The same applies to electronics - if there is a way to use this superconductor in transistors and microchips - the heat loss from operation could be reduced to nil, meaning you can have a chip with little/no thermal loss while operating. This eliminates the need for expensive cooling (again, typically copper or aluminum) and also all the complexity/cost associated with that. The power consumption of these chips is typically a result of the electricity losses as the current is driven into the chip at low voltage. Less thermal waste means much higher efficiency chips, which means less power required to operate them, which means much less consumption (and battery required to supply it). Mobile phones built with superconducting components and chips could last weeks on a standard battery since almost all the power consumption would be the radio, speakers and the screen.

Since the superconducting temperature claimed by the initial team (127 °C) is much higher than most ambient temperatures, this means the potential applications are essentially anywhere outside of a heat source.

Batteries and battery packs could be miniaturized to some extent - reducing transmission losses and eliminating heat on low voltage power means you can reduce the amount of copper required in a battery pack, and inside the battery itself, by a significant margin. This leads to lighter batteries out of the gate. Coupled with lighter cables to carry the power and lighter/cooler electronics to manage and distribute that power and manage the heat - the weight savings could be very significant.

The potential for miniaturization and displacement of heavy/expensive/bulky traditional conductors is very large and not possible to understate.

My last chemistry class was in high school, so I had to glide over a lot of the details. But the story is still awesome even with liberal skimming of chem reaction details.

This book is probably helping me cope with the extreme confusion of all the various LK-99 attempts. Like, it's going to be a hugely messy confusion and slog with lots of results that are "blend-A can meet 5 of the 7 requirements, but not the important ones. blend-B can meet 3 of the 7, but one of the important ones. blend-C looks very promising but doesn't quite meet any of the requirements." for... years.

From my understanding the first paper was published without authorization. So it was likely they were not ready for it to be published. So 2) still seems possible to me. Like what if the team was it seems like we have a room temperature super conductor we need to do more work to be 100% sure though, and then someone then just goes and publishes your rough draft. It could still just be something interesting, and not fraud.

-EDIT- Like if the first paper was not released as is let's say after their testing it turns out to not be room temperature and ambient pressure. They could have easily revised their paper to be about new class of super conducting material ect.... or just not published the paper if it was dud.