> Well, for starters, batteries have their own internal resistance.
Indeed they do.
> Not a whole lot, but enough that whether you short out with copper wire or superconductor, the effect would be the same.
Not necessarily, assuming a charged battery in many cases with a copper wire the wire will simply heat up to the point of evaporation and then break the circuit as it sprays molten copper bits all over the place. Some heat will be generated in the battery as well. Watch people mess up with starter cables for some ideas on how this tends to go (and do so from a distance...).
Using a massive copper connector that you some how instantly put across the terminal and manage to keep there would indeed make the balance of the resistance shift to the guts of the battery, which would heat up faster than that that energy can be shed and hence in all likelihood (violently) explode. Besides bits of molten lead and zinc for a car battery you now also have the joy of having to deal with spraying acid. Which depending on the state of charge of the battery can be really nasty stuff.
With a superconductor there would be no chance of the conductor evaporating first, there isn't any work done in the superconductor so it will stay cold, an explosion of the battery would be all but guaranteed.
Keep in mind that a superconducting energy storage device is kind of the opposite of a battery. An idle battery at full charge has some voltage and zero current, and it’s perfectly happy to stay like that.
An idle superconducting energy storage at full “charge” is not carrying a charge at all — it’s carrying a current. If you cut the wire (or blow a fuse), V = L dI/dt will generate an arbitrarily high voltage to keep that current flowing.
I imagine one would need some spark gaps and/or capacitors to limit the voltage.
It's a coil. You can just place another inductor around it and increase / decrease that current at will. This is how Kamerlingh Onnes injected current into his superconducting media during the original experiments and that is a two-way street.
Indeed they do.
> Not a whole lot, but enough that whether you short out with copper wire or superconductor, the effect would be the same.
Not necessarily, assuming a charged battery in many cases with a copper wire the wire will simply heat up to the point of evaporation and then break the circuit as it sprays molten copper bits all over the place. Some heat will be generated in the battery as well. Watch people mess up with starter cables for some ideas on how this tends to go (and do so from a distance...).
Using a massive copper connector that you some how instantly put across the terminal and manage to keep there would indeed make the balance of the resistance shift to the guts of the battery, which would heat up faster than that that energy can be shed and hence in all likelihood (violently) explode. Besides bits of molten lead and zinc for a car battery you now also have the joy of having to deal with spraying acid. Which depending on the state of charge of the battery can be really nasty stuff.
With a superconductor there would be no chance of the conductor evaporating first, there isn't any work done in the superconductor so it will stay cold, an explosion of the battery would be all but guaranteed.