Are superconducting magnets really dependable? Will it be safe to travel by MagLev?
A. Superconducting magnets are highly reliable. High-energy accelerators routinely operate with many hundreds of superconducting magnets positioned along the path followed by particles that travel in precise orbits along miles of evacuated tubes. If only one of these many hundred magnets failed, it would shut down the accelerator for a long period while the magnet was repaired or replaced. Such a situation could not be tolerated, and in fact, does not occur in practice. In the proposed superconducting super collider (SSC), for example, over 10,000 superconducting magnets would have been positioned along the 76-kilometer circumference of the SSC. Failure of one of these magnets would have shut down the SSC. The MagLev vehicles are designed with multiple (typically 16) superconducting magnets that operate separately and independently of each other. The vehicle will remain levitated and operate safely even if several of its magnets were to fail. Because the failure rate of superconducting
