[Flipside]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11773791

Scientists at Cern manage to successfully store an atom of Antimatter.

Cool Stuff!

[SpardaSon21]

Well, there goes the Vatican.

[Col. Fishguts]

Woot, that's actually quite an accomplishment. Slowing the stuff down enough to trap it in a magnetic bottle has been tried for a long time without much success until l now.

[watsisname]

Yeeees, next come the Tsunami Bombs. 

[IronBeer]

One atom down, about a hojillion more to go before antimatter can actually be used for something on a large scale.

[Mongoose]

Two-tenths of a second is a pretty damn long time at that scale.  Impressive.

[Bobboau]

I have a feeling this is going to be one of those technologies that advances at a geometric rate. anti-mater might make for a nearly perfect rocket fuel.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I doubt any beneficial uses will come quickly.  Rockets maybe.  More likely warheads.  It's destructive power is too great and well you can expect the armies of the world to want that.  Now if we survive those uses then yea rockets for peaceful purposes at some point.

[General Battuta]

Antimatter will never be a cost-effective weapon compared to nukes in the short term.

[Bobboau]

"in the short term" being the operative phrase.

[General Battuta]

Possibly never. It will certainly never be effective for power generation, and while it may be a useful fuel or weapon, it's not clear that just using the equivalent energy/effort budget of nukes wouldn't get you a bigger bang or push.

[Flipside]

I suppose it's possible a different, cheaper, methodology may come up in the future, but certainly making it this way it wouldn't give the bang per buck of nukes.

I think it's more fascinating from a research point of things, Antimatter as such may not be directly useful for stuff, but being able to hold it stable long enough to examine it in detail may help point the way to power sources etc.

[Kosh]

Possibly never. It will certainly never be effective for power generation, and while it may be a useful fuel or weapon, it's not clear that just using the equivalent energy/effort budget of nukes wouldn't get you a bigger bang or push.

It's only 1000+ times more powerful than a nuke. Antimatter is the ultimate in terms of energy storage.

[General Battuta]

Possibly never. It will certainly never be effective for power generation, and while it may be a useful fuel or weapon, it's not clear that just using the equivalent energy/effort budget of nukes wouldn't get you a bigger bang or push.

It's only 1000+ times more powerful than a nuke. Antimatter is the ultimate in terms of energy storage.

Which is utterly irrelevant to anything in the statement you quoted. Antimatter is effective as a way of rapidly releasing a great deal of energy in thrust or as a weapon, but in most conceivable development paths it is utterly useless for sustained power generation, and in either of the above applications it may never be cost-effective compared to the same energy/effort budget spent on nukes.

This is because of conservation of mass-energy - you'll never get more power out of antimatter generation than you put in - and because containment is wildly impractical and energy-expensive on its own; and because antimatter is not, as is often touted, 100% efficient in converting mass to usable energy.

The only probable way antimatter could  become a practical energy source is if a pre-existing natural reservoir was somehow found. That's something we should hope won't happen in the near future.

[Kolgena]

I think he meant actual energy storage, like, for when the volume of your energy source matters a lot. Examples may include rocket fuel or special ops/terrorist weapons.

[General Battuta]

Rocket fuel and weapons were both examples I gave as a very extravagant but conceivably sane applications of antimatter. For almost any other form of energy storage it's not worth it. Even in those two applications, the same energy/effort budget in nukes would probably do it better.

[Bobboau]

well, we have no idea how hard it will be to make anti-mater in 100 years, it might not turn out to be as hard as you think.

[General Battuta]

Quite so, but it will nonetheless never be useful for anything except packing as much boom as possible into as small a space as possible. Because the antimatter must be synthesized from scratch, it will never be net-energy profitable, either as a thrust source or a weapon.

Compare that to nukes, which require minimal energy investment because they run off naturally occurring material.

If the ratio remains skewed so heavily in favor of nukes, antimatter will never escape scientific curiosity. And being awesome in PET scans.

As a factoid that came up on the Blue Planet forum recently, consider that antimatter, even used as a weapon, only converts about a half or two thirds of its yield into meaningful blast. That's far far bigger than a nuke, but so is the energy requirement to get any meaningful amount of antimatter in the first place. If you can spend X amount of energy/effort, and if it pays off with more results by spending it on nukes than antimatter, nukes will be the better pick.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Unless there is abundant anti-matter available just for the taking.  For all we know there is a brane right next to ours containing a universe that is totally antimatter.  Finding a way to pull it through a higher dimension may be possible some day.  Heck these type of experiments may lead to that in a 100 years. 

[General Battuta]

Right, thus the above comment

The only probable way antimatter could  become a practical energy source is if a pre-existing natural reservoir was somehow found. That's something we should hope won't happen in the near future.

but I'd been thinking of antimatter inside our Level I; if some kind of isolated but accessible source like a neighboring braine opens up that would be less potentially catastrophic.