Antimatter is a completely different story.

The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen.

At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.

A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.

So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.

But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.

Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.

Surely you understand there's a difference?

Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match.

Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.

And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.

Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.

Average human threat perceptions simply aren't useful here. People will also make wild assumptions about what kind of catastrophic thing could happen in aviation and then happily enter their car to drive somewhere without a thought in the world. In fact noone thought about designing gasoline fuel tanks in a safe way before we had cars. Not even really until people started burning. If we're already thinking about transporting antimatter safely today, this kind of technology will probably have an even better track record than planes.

Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.

Except rocket fuel lines are often leaking, and the most common cause of launch delays.

With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.

If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion.

Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.

There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.

According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...

That's just an engineering problem as well.

Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_starship

I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.