re: Geneva’s CERN hails delicate test on transporting antimatter as a scientific success

So, yeah, this is all totally normal and sciencey.

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Need to focus on perfecting fusion before moving on to antimatter

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Different applications entirely. Since there aren’t appreciable amounts of naturally-occurring antimatter available for harvesting (as far as we know anyhow) we have to make it ourselves. That means a net energy loss. Antimatter can theoretically serve as an incredibly mass-efficient way to store energy, but it’s not an energy source in the sense of tritium/deuterium fusion fuels.

The big theoretical application (outside of the obvious one - weapons) is space flight. An antimatter rocket would have orders of magnitude more delta-V than a chemical rocket of the same dry mass.

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Fusion solves most of this planets energy issues.

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I disagree. It sounds good in theory because of the low cost of fuel, but the theoretical capital costs of fusion power plants (even after solving the engineering problems and getting net energy output) are staggering. The fuel could be free, and it still wouldn’t be competitive with fossil fuels due to capital/operating/maintenance costs. It’s the same problem fission has. Less (but not zero) radioactive waste, sure, but the biggest issue with nuclear power today is simple economics compared to CCGT generators.

Now if we run out of fossil fuels, then yeah.. eventually fusion becomes cost-competitive. But at that point we have a major problem because it means the price of energy has skyrocketed globally. There’s also the thought that fusion plants can generate economies of scale, but there’s a limit to how much you can centralize power generation before transmission becomes a major problem.

That’s not to say that fusion won’t have a place (assuming we figure it out) but it’s not going to be the energy revolution people seem to think, at least IMHO.

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The antiprotons were then placed back in their usual lab area, and the operation was concluded

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Glad they put the antiprotons back where they got them when they were done.