ruveyn wrote:
Sand wrote:
For someone who spent his life in technology your viewpoint is rather surprising. What was the mass in grams of created plutonium when the first indications of fission were discovered back in the 1940's or slightly before?
All beginnings are hard and the only things that count are final results. It is endings, not beginnings that count. Most beginnings are steps down dead end roads.
ruveyn
they are already producing around a thousand times as much antimatter as they can realiably harvest, at the moment i think the record is around 300 captured antihydrogen for 15 minutes.
"approximately 25 million antiprotons leave the Antiproton Decelerator and roughly 25,000 make it to the Penning-Malmberg trap"
so we could make thousands of times more than we do today if we had the energy to power the facilities and a more reliable method of trapping them, for longer periods of time as well ot they will be useless, (would require pulsed fusion r large nuclear reactors i think)
however not even that amount would come close to a gram and as such the only use i can ever see for antimatter is experimentation and spacetravel.
"A rough estimate to produce the 10 milligrams of positrons needed for a human Mars mission is about 250 million dollars using technology that is currently under development," said Smith. This cost might seem high, but it has to be considered against the extra cost to launch a heavier chemical rocket (current launch costs are about $10,000 per pound) or the cost to fuel and make safe a nuclear reactor. "Based on the experience with nuclear technology, it seems reasonable to expect positron production cost to go down with more research," added Smith.
this concept uses a nuclear reactor aboard the ship to produce a steady stream of antimatter that react with a target behind the space ship.
linkage
_________________
//through chaos comes complexity//
the scent of the tamarillo is pungent and powerfull,
woe be to the nose who nears it.
10 Jun 2011, 2:08 pm
