If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.

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sigmoid10 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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queuebert 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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adrian_b 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.

The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.

But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.

For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.

Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.

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ComputerGuru 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.

	▲	amelius 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The problem is that a tiny leak will eat away your spacecraft, thereby making the situation worse.

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amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.