Antimatter Belt Discovered Around Earth

Finally someone who knows what they're talking about.

If you remove the radiation, the fallout becomes of little concern. And as is pointed out there, nuclear winter has been discredited for some time.

So then it's just cleaning up, which is far easier said than done.

Did you like the middle ages? Here's your chance to live through them again! Just start a nuclear war!

But I'm concerned nuclear holocaust is too off topic.

Also, this.

edited 11th Aug '11 12:09:11 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

If the only thing we can do with antimatter now is to make more bombs then I think it better left untouched for now.

But knowing that there is a relatively accessible source of antimatter could potentially make research for antimatter use a higher priority for the scientists and when there are more people put their minds into it then we can see faster advance in this field.

I'm fine with more bombs, the military people will always want more boom, but please make something else that is not bomb to go with it too.

Well, it's unlikely to be like the middle ages. More like the early nineteenth century. Unless they decide to build a antimatter cluster bomb designed to lightly dust entire regions with low level nuclear fire.

Fight smart, not fair.

I keep hearing about usability for star-ship fuel, does it have value as fuel for Earthbound things?

Only if you want some seriously high density power cells.

Fight smart, not fair.

Well... yes, but not that I can think of off the top of my head.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Military powered armor.

Fight smart, not fair.

Antimatter fueled power armor? Awesome.

I don't want the guy next to me turning into a nuclear fireball if his power pack gets shot.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Might be viable for starting large-scale fusion power plant for a long period of time...

Give me cute or give me...something?

In a sense, the radioactive fallout is one of nuclear weapons' best features. Their tremendous yield acts as a deterrent to all-out war, and their fallout acts as a deterrent to actually using them.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

Spacecraft is basically the only application where weight concerns are large enough to justify using antimatter as an energy storage medium. Anything else could probably be done more effectively with something vastly easier to harvest, contain and generally deal with. Antimatter-initiated fusion itself seems vastly easier than some sort of pure antimatter reaction, since this requires significantly less antimatter while still having nicely large energy density.

Only if you put a high enough amount of antimatter. It's very dense energy, the minimum amount of energy per reaction is still pretty low.

Fight smart, not fair.

-is patiently waiting for the end of the world-

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

If you were to release the entire stored energy in a car's fuel tank in a fraction of a second, it would be a pretty powerful explosive. The containment system for any appreciable amount of antimatter would be much heavier than a fuel tank (with present day technology, heavier than a car) so you'd have to store quite a lot more energy than that to make it worthwhile. And if the containment system fails, it's all going to go at once.

Antimatter is not going to be a personal power source in the foreseeable future. It's simply not practical to put such a power generation system on anything short of spaceship size, and for vehicles like ships, it's much more economical to just use gasoline. The only reason they're even considering it for spacecraft is because that's an application which requires not just tremendous energy, but tremendous energy density. Because the energy *cost* of launching a spaceship is directly proportional to its mass, conventional fuels become less economical because so much energy is spent lifting the fuel itself; the fuel constitutes the majority of the weight of the vehicle at launch, so lifting a spacecraft with antimatter requires much less total energy. For applications like personal military equipment on the other hand, using antimatter is simply not a good idea.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

This proposed spacecraft design from the University of Pennsylvania looks more promising in light of this discovery. It's an antiproton-catalyzed microfusion drive that uses about 30 nanograms of antimatter... and look at what was just discovered orbiting the Earth.

It also uses the explosion concept drive similar to the Orion, my personal favorite for interplanetary drives.

@Lessinath: That's, er… Not really necessary. An antimatter-pumped fusion bomb wouldn't need to have the equivalent of a fission bomb to start the chain reaction, it would simply need to create sufficient heat and pressure for a limited quantity of the fusion fuel.

Nobody is talking seriously about powering interstellar spaceships directly off antimatter with currently known technology, since it would probably require more than exists in the entire solar system or could be made with the entire planet's combined GDP in a decades.

As links posted throughout the thread point out, most of these designs use extremely tiny amounts of antimatter, so small that current terrestrial manufacturing capacity would actually suffice.

It's a bit of that, but the sum total of it works even with none of those components. For instance, we already have chemical explosives more powerful than the smallest nukes, and nukes that have little or no fallout (such as neutron and EMP bombs,) but the sheer stigma of nuclear weapons means that anyone caught using one would be instantly vilified by the international community, and politicians all over the world have understood this well enough where none have ever been used since WWII. I seriously doubt a clean fusion bomb would have any policy impact whatsoever as compared with current weapons.

Eric,

The energy values and amounts of antimatter listed are not large by any means, actually. That 32,871.6 megajoule number I gave for one probe collecting for 20 years?

That's 32,871,600,000 Joules. The Hiroshima bomb was ~62,760,000,000,000 Joules by conservative estimates. The Hiroshima bomb was more than three full orders of magnitude higher. This amount of antimatter MAY be enough to initiate a proper fusion explosion, but it also might not be.

Remember, you don't need to just start a fusion reaction, you need to start a fusion reaction powerful enough that it makes other nearby fusible material undergo fusion also, which is no small feat by any means.

edited 13th Aug '11 6:12:00 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

I'm almost positive that neutron bombs have similar levels of fallout, since the neutrons are what induces radioactive fallout.

Fight smart, not fair.

No, neutrons induce some fallout but relatively little. Unless you're doing something like intentionally salting your bomb.

Most of the fallout is from unexploded nuclear fuel and decay products from exploded nuclear fuel. Nuclear weapons are extremely inefficient - 5% efficiency is GOOD.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Hm, I was remembering it backwards then.

Fight smart, not fair.