[grabby]

The ultimate power source is antimatter power. MIT is working on it, so hopefully they will have a breakthrough here soon before we hit peak oil downslope.

One gram of antimatter is equivalent to 43 kilotons of TNT. In reality, all known technologies involve particle accelerators and they are highly inefficient, making the production of antimatter much more expensive at this time.

Antimatter is very compact. One could carry ten kilograms in a suitcase, and it would run the equivalent of United states power needs for one day.

It is estimated that an antimatter factory could be operated at a cost of $25 billion per gram. The above estimations are highly speculative, however.

In 2004, the annual production of antiprotons at the Antiproton Decelerator facility of CERN was several picograms at a cost of $20 million. This means to produce 1 gram of antimatter, we would need to spend 100 quintillion dollars and run the antimatter factory for 100 billion years.

In fact since the 1980's, scientists have not been able to increase the production rate of antiprotons, whereas the production costs have actually increased. There are physical laws (the small cross-section of antiproton production in high-energy nuclear collisions) which make it difficult or impossible to drastically improve the production efficiency of antimatter.

But if we find a cunk of it floating about the universe it would solve all our needs,

[EndOfSewers]

10 kg of antimatter per day, at $25 billion per gram, is a measly 2.5 x 10^17 dollars per day. I can't believe we're not doing this already.

[Jack]

But if we find a cunk of it floating about the universe it would solve all our needs,

1) How would we transport it back?

2) How would we store it once we got it here?

Unless, of course, one proposes a rapid pruning of the population...

[JoeCoal]

10 kg of antimatter per day, at $25 billion per gram, is a measly 2.5 x 10^17 dollars per day. I can't believe we're not doing this already.

Yeah, no problem. Helicopter Ben will just print that right up for us...

[Lighthouse]

1) How would we transport it back?

2) How would we store it once we got it here?

Unless, of course, one proposes a rapid pruning of the population...

Ask Scotty. He always knew how to get Anti Matter which was used as fuel for his ship. He knew how to harvest it, how to transport it and how to store it. Best of all he knew how to use it to propel Enterprise faster than light

[EndOfSewers]

The best thing we could do with that big chunk of antimatter would be to nudge it into a retrograde orbit somehow and let this tired old planet take it head on at about 50,000 kph.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Storage would not be a problem, as magnetic traps could be used for this purpose.
It could also be transported in such devices.

The problem is rather in MAKING it.

One can rather forget finding it somewhere in Universe (or in our Solar System).
All evidence from astronomic observations suggests that it is simply not there in more than trace amounts and those traces are in highly dispersed state what makes them non recoverable.
You may forget about meteorites containing kilograms or tones of antimatter. They are not there.
However it would be interesting if few tones of antimater in form of meteorite had fallen on the Earth, say tommorow morning.

If you make it artificially on the Earth, it is rather energy carrier than source. Its EROEI is SUBSTANTIALLY NEGATIVE.
Far more energy is needed to make it, than you will get back from it.
Should technology be developed to make larger quantities, antimatter would still remain a fuel for interstellar propulsion systems rather than energy source on the Earth.
As I am aware antimatter is no go subject for energy production on the Earth.
Small (atom size) black hole on the Earth orbit fed with ordinary matter to keep its mass constant and producing copious amounts of usable Hawking radiation would be probably easier applied as energy source for the Earth than antimatter.

[XOVERX]

I'm starting to think that maybe anti-matter ain't exactly the answer we're looking for.

[0mar]

The ultimate power source is antimatter power. MIT is working on it, so hopefully they will have a breakthrough here soon before we hit peak oil downslope.

One gram of antimatter is equivalent to 43 kilotons of TNT. In reality, all known technologies involve particle accelerators and they are highly inefficient, making the production of antimatter much more expensive at this time.

Antimatter is very compact. One could carry ten kilograms in a suitcase, and it would run the equivalent of United states power needs for one day.

It is estimated that an antimatter factory could be operated at a cost of $25 billion per gram. The above estimations are highly speculative, however.

In 2004, the annual production of antiprotons at the Antiproton Decelerator facility of CERN was several picograms at a cost of $20 million. This means to produce 1 gram of antimatter, we would need to spend 100 quintillion dollars and run the antimatter factory for 100 billion years.

In fact since the 1980's, scientists have not been able to increase the production rate of antiprotons, whereas the production costs have actually increased. There are physical laws (the small cross-section of antiproton production in high-energy nuclear collisions) which make it difficult or impossible to drastically improve the production efficiency of antimatter.

But if we find a cunk of it floating about the universe it would solve all our needs,

In a word no. We'll have long exhausted any and every source of energy before Anti-Matter becomes viable.

[Shiraz]

10 kg of antimatter per day, at $25 billion per gram, is a measly 2.5 x 10^17 dollars per day. I can't believe we're not doing this already.

Oh I wouldn't worry about that. Everyone knows that antimatter will become economic when the oil price hits $80-85 billion a barrel.

[emailking]

As was previously said, the EROEI for this utterly negative. The best you could even theoretically do is break even. Nothing complicated about this one. You make antimatter by colliding particles together. The energy coming into a Feyman diagram has to be the same as the energy leaving it, period.

[eric_b]

Yeah, right

Storage of the stuff would be rather... touchy. Magnetic confinement
perhaps, in a hard vacuum.

EROEI is highly, highly negative at this point.

from:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press ... ter06.html

Since its start-up in 1985, Fermilab's Antiproton Source has produced just over 3.91 nanograms (billionth of a gram) of antiprotons, the largest amount ever produced by any accelerator. Visitors will learn about the nature of antimatter and how scientists produce tiny amounts of antiprotons at Fermilab. Throughout the program scientists will be on hand to answer questions.

A very expensive 4 nanograms.

Actually I think antimatter production should be pursued. It would
amount to the ultimate in high energy weapons. How else would
one be able to design a suitcase sized weapon with a yield in
the gigatonne range?

[sicophiliac]

Yeah, right

Storage of the stuff would be rather... touchy. Magnetic confinement
perhaps, in a hard vacuum.

EROEI is highly, highly negative at this point.

from:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press ... ter06.html

Since its start-up in 1985, Fermilab's Antiproton Source has produced just over 3.91 nanograms (billionth of a gram) of antiprotons, the largest amount ever produced by any accelerator. Visitors will learn about the nature of antimatter and how scientists produce tiny amounts of antiprotons at Fermilab. Throughout the program scientists will be on hand to answer questions.

A very expensive 4 nanograms.

Actually I think antimatter production should be pursued. It would
amount to the ultimate in high energy weapons. How else would
one be able to design a suitcase sized weapon with a yield in
the gigatonne range?

Even an electromagnetic field containment would be problematic. The electrons in that field would anihilate themselves with the positrons in the antimatter would they not ? This alone might create a chain reaction of instability and could make for one hell of a big mushroom cloud! Also back to EROEI theres no doubt with todays technology the EROEI would probably be .00001:1 if that.
Maybe someday though.. hundreds of years from now they will figure out a radical new way to produce it but I think in the meantime we should dream of nuclear fusion instead.

[emailking]

Even an electromagnetic field containment would be problematic. The electrons in that field would anihilate themselves with the positrons in the antimatter would they not ? This alone might create a chain reaction of instability and could make for one hell of a big mushroom cloud! Also back to EROEI theres no doubt with todays technology the EROEI would probably be .00001:1 if that.
Maybe someday though.. hundreds of years from now they will figure out a radical new way to produce it but I think in the meantime we should dream of nuclear fusion instead.

Sorry, but no. An electromagnetic field is not composed of electrons. From the wuantum mechanics perspective, you can consider it to be made of photons. But these photons react with antimatter identically (in almost all cases) to the way they do with matter.

[Tanada]

If you really want to know what Anti-matter power can do plug some numbers in
http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm
100 grams (0.1 Kilogram) yields 4.296 MT of energy. In English units that would be 3.52 Ounces. One pound gives you 19.52 Megatons and a Kilogram 42.96 MT.

Just for fun say you had a 513 pounds of antimatter in the trunk of your car. The energy release would be 10,000 MT, the same as if every known and suspected weapon on Earth went off in the same spot at exactly the same time.

[Subjectivist]

If you really want to know what Anti-matter power can do plug some numbers in
http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm
100 grams (0.1 Kilogram) yields 4.296 MT of energy. In English units that would be 3.52 Ounces. One pound gives you 19.52 Megatons and a Kilogram 42.96 MT.

Just for fun say you had a 513 pounds of antimatter in the trunk of your car. The energy release would be 10,000 MT, the same as if every known and suspected weapon on Earth went off in the same spot at exactly the same time.

Such cheerful numbers, how much does it take to cause impact winter and drop us into the depths of an iceball Earth?

[dissident]

If you really want to know what Anti-matter power can do plug some numbers in
http://www.edwardmuller.com/right17.htm
100 grams (0.1 Kilogram) yields 4.296 MT of energy. In English units that would be 3.52 Ounces. One pound gives you 19.52 Megatons and a Kilogram 42.96 MT.

Just for fun say you had a 513 pounds of antimatter in the trunk of your car. The energy release would be 10,000 MT, the same as if every known and suspected weapon on Earth went off in the same spot at exactly the same time.

Such cheerful numbers, how much does it take to cause impact winter and drop us into the depths of an iceball Earth?

It wouldn't. After two years over 98% of the aerosol in the atmosphere would be removed. In fact, anything over 10 microns in size would rapidly drop out and clear out after a few months. It's the fine scale (less than 1 micron) that persists in the air and gets transported around. But due to the exponential density decrease with altitude even the fine mode aerosol cannot stay aloft for long in the upper stratosphere and higher. So there will not be a "dust Jung layer".

A 10,000 megaton detonation is not that big. The Chicxulub impactor was the equivalent of 2 million Tsar bomb (50 megaton) explosions, so 100,000,000 megatons.

[jedrider]

We've heard all this before: After 100 Billion years and they still have nothing to show, they'll ask for another 100 Billion years.

[Rod_Cloutier]

I suppose that anti-matter will be risk free, with no radioactive waste or other unforeseen problems

https://youtu.be/P6oyiDqrDrg?t=1m8s

Technology is neutral, it can be used for good or evil. Who would we trust to handle these dangerous and potentially catastrophic materials

[dissident]

I suppose that anti-matter will be risk free, with no radioactive waste or other unforeseen problems

https://youtu.be/P6oyiDqrDrg?t=1m8s

Technology is neutral, it can be used for good or evil. Who would we trust to handle these dangerous and potentially catastrophic materials

Producing anti-matter is like producing gold from lead. The amounts produced in accelerators are nowhere near viable for commercial relevance.