3 ms·

Inefficiently in the context of antimatter storage makes every industrial accident since the dawn of time combined seem like a kid spilling their juice.

• Retric 2y ago
  The inefficiencies around storage are a practical not a safety concern. Once cooled we can contain the particles just fine the issue is only 0.1% get trapped and the apparatus is vastly larger than the mass of antimatter stored.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    To put that into number that people can understand, to accelerate 1kg of matter to 94% the speed of light you need 1kg of antimatter. That is the equivalent of the tsar bomb. So the storage facility would need to withstand that type of explosion 1000 times over for every kg of antimatter it produces. World ending doesn't begin to describe what that looks like.
    • Retric 2y ago
      That assumes the energy is released in a fraction of a second which would preclude cooling the antimatter. Do the same thing over a year in many different devices and you’re basically dealing with a normal nuclear power plant’s output.
      • llm_trw 2y ago
        I imagine you will want to send more than 1kg worth of payload.
        • Retric 2y ago
          I’d expect people would need a more efficient system, but it’s also the work of years and multiple sets of space based equipment working in parallel.
  • scheme271 2y ago
    If you look at particle accelerators, the anti-matter storage is still very much experimental with anti-hydrogen storage holding it for less than 20s at most. We can trap individual particles (e.g. protons) for a long time but things get exponentially more complicated as you increase the size of the system. Hell, we can't even store hydrogen without leakage issues and with anti-hydrogen any leakage is very bad.