Physicists Build Bigger 'Bottles' For Antimatter 119
intellitech writes "Once regarded as the stuff of science fiction, antimatter — the mirror image of the ordinary matter in our observable universe — is now the focus of laboratory studies around the world. While physicists routinely produce antimatter with radioisotopes and particle colliders, cooling these antiparticles and containing them for any length of time is another story. Clifford Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego, who is constructing what he hopes will be the world's largest antimatter container, said physicists have recently developed new methods to make special states of antimatter in which they can create large clouds of antiparticles, compress them and make specially tailored beams for a variety of uses."
Re:Idiots. (Score:5, Informative)
Idiots are going to blow us all to Kingdom Come. You know this is just the first step in making a planet buster bomb.
To produce enough anti-matter to match the destructive potential of the Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb, you would need the energy output of a gigawatt power station for 6.6 years. And that is assuming perfect production and storage which we are no where close to achieving. In reality, it takes orders of magnitude more energy to crate anti-matter than can get out of the annihilation of that anti-matter, so the actual length of time would be closer to 600 years than 6.
So, sorry, no earth shattering kaboom just yet.
Re:Pure antiproton (Score:5, Informative)
Unless I've done the math wrong, annihilation of one hydrogen/anti-hydrogen pair yields about 3*10^-9 joules. Not much of a bang.
Re:Cleaning up nuclear waste and other stuff... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes but I think the antimatter annihilation reaction would cause side reactions that would release neutrons and create more nuclear waste...
In practice, though, the reason highly radioactive nuclear waste even exists as a problem is because it ISN'T waste - it's unburned fuel. More than 99% of the energy in the nuclear fuel is still remaining, which is why the waste can emit dangerous levels of radiation for thousands of years.