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Air Force Researching Antimatter Weapons
mlmitton writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy. Perhaps more interesting, after an initial inquiry by the Chronicle in the summer, the Air Force issued a gag order that prohibits any Air Force employee from discussing antimatter research or funding."
e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy
How much energy is that in Burning Libraries of Congress? I'm not entirely up to speed on these new-fangled measurements. Rods an' hogsheads, for me!
In other news... The air force research center suddenly dissappeared along with 200.000 square kilometers of land. Nobody from the research center was available for comment.
isn't this a tremendous waste of money? I'm generally pretty high on national defense, but is our biggest national security threat really that nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough?
We can not afford a mine shaft gap!
Shouldn't that be -1 gram of anti matter?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons. Such weapons would easy eclipse nuclear weapons in power, e.g., 1 gram of antimatter would equal 23 space shuttle fuel tanks of energy.
Are we sure they're pursuing weapons? We are talking about the Air Force, and it's funny how they'd compare the relative energy to a spaceship fuel tank, of all things...
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So yea, woo hoo anti-matter power!
Sure, it's radioactive, just like fission, but hey antimatter is cheap at $62.5 trillion per gram, and it's 10-100 times more powerful!
Not sure what the point would be in antimatter weapons, besides serious coolness. Nukes are at least stable at room temperature, and if you drop a ball of plutonium on your foot, all you get is broken toes. Wouldn't want to have a power failure anywhere NEAR antimatter.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
this should be "from the stuff-that-antimatters dept."
For a balanced view, it is important to realize that anti-matter physics have yielded substantial medical and non-military benefits already. Many people probably already encountered various applications of this technology without realizing it.
For example, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a very useful clinical and medical research tool for brain and cardiac functional imaging. See: Positron Emission Tomography
Uh, basic physics, people. The Universe is comprised of matter, not anti-matter. You can make anti-matter, but it takes a heapload of energy (recall that E=mc^2 applies to anything that has mass), and you cannot go out and mine anti-matter. Why? Mostly because if there were any antimatter around, it would have a nasty tendency to interact with all that matter and be converted to energy.
So, you can use it to create a nice bomb, but it's equivalent to pumping up a pressurized bottle with a lot of air -- the only energy that's going to come out is the energy that you've put in to create the anti-matter. You make some anti-matter, find a way to confine it and later release it in a controlled fasion and you get a very nice bomb which is incredibly powerful given the mass of the active ingredients. But you cannot use it as an energy source because unlike coal, oil, natural gas and uranium, it isn't freely available: you have to make it.
This is in stark contrast with nuclear fusion and fission: there is lots of available material lying around in the ground and in the seas, just waiting to be extracted and used. While you can find ways of generating anti-matter without putting too much energy into the process (eg, by triggering nuclear decay) you just don't get that much mass very quickly. Unless, of course, you've got a right raging nuclear reaction going, and, then, well, your problems of bomb making are pretty well solved.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I think everyone's spinning it wrong. The most useful thing you can do with lots of positrons would be to build an antimater-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion engine. With a good source for lots of positrons, you should be able to build nukes small enough to be useful.
In Texas, "shitload" is an official unit of measurement. I suspect this technology will yield energy on a scale several orders of shitload greater than any other to date this side of the sun.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
What? You have a problem with Footbal Fields Squared?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I think you've got it. Consider that space shuttle.
It's something like 95% fuel by weight on takeoff. Now, if your engines are burning antimatter, you can replace all that weight with payload and still reach orbit!
If the antimatter could be manufactured for a reasonable multiple of the energy cost, it would cause the cost of getting stuff into space to drop dramatically.
Less radioactive. Alot of what you see in a fission bomb is the "unburnt" materials being dispersed by the explosion, the fallout. This just won't exist with anti-hydrogen (I'm assuming this is the most synthesizable element). However, even with fission, not all of it exists beforehand, when you have neutrons flying fuckfast all over the place, some stick in a nucleus here and there producing what are usually small halflife radioactive elements. A m/am would produce lots of all different sorts of radiation and fast particles... there is sure to be something created that lasts longer than a split second. And of course, immediately after the explosion, everything far enough away to avoid being vaporized will be dosed heavily.
It might very well be more scary, and not just from a power perspective... assume something as big as a nuke, but as (nearly) clean as a conventional explosive. The temptation to use it might be greater, the inhibitions even less.
BTW, anyone want to speculate on H/anti-H bombs? No neutrons to shoot all over the place, but at least a few protons (I'm assuming less than 100% perfect mix). And what happens when an anti-H atom hits oxygen or nitrogen, how does that work exactly?
Actually, you can hold a chunk of plutonium in your hand with little side effect.
When the plutonium core of the Trinity device was delivered to the site, the commander insisted that the courier open the case containing it - he said something along the lines of "I won't sign for anything unless I have actually seen it".
So, the courier opened the case, the BC took the sphere out, held it briefly (noting the warmth and "feeling of potential"), then returned it and signed for it.
Go read "The Day The Sun Rose Twice" for the details.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you think that 3 million deaths over 60 years makes the US government the worst in history, you should go back to the history books.
In African history, there were plenty of times when 3 million over 60 years would pale in comparison. Then, look into the colonial period of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. Between the numbers of natives murdered, worked to death, killed by disease, and the slaves brought in to replace them, 3 million over 60 years wouldn't look so bad at all. In fact, one particularly dark period of Belgian rule in the Congo brought about 10 million deaths over 40 years.
Germany, of course, slaughtered far more than 3 million (perhaps as high as 11 million) during WW2. The Russian gulag system would rival the 3 million mark, and that was perpetrated against it's own citizens.
I'm not in any way taking any side on any part - American or otherwise. I'm just saying that your statement of the US government being the worst in the history of the world would take an awfully skewed, narrow viewpoint to accept.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
A co-worker's husband runs a Septic Tank clearing business. When we asked what a shitload was we were told "1600 gallons".
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
In a fission reaction the fallout comes from two sources. The first is the by-products of the fission reaction. I believe it is radioactive isotopes of Cesium and Potassium. This radioactive particles combine with the uranium/plutonim that did not fission and get distributed as fallout.
A pure fusion bomb, e.g. neutron bomb, has only a fusion reaction and thus theoretically produces no radioactive fallout. However in practice a fission reaction is used to create the pressure and heat needed to start the fusion reaction.
See the Special Weapons Primer at http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/index.html for more info.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Here is the math..
E = 2mc^2
E = h*frequency
Frequency of the photon = 2 m*c*c/h
where m = mass of electron c = speed of light
h = planck constant
Now according to google
m = 9.109*10^-31 c= 3*10^8 h = 6.63 *10-34
frequency comes out to be 2.47*10^20 hertz
which comes under gamma rays.
So indeed the positron+electron will produce gamma rays
Or imagine buying a motor vehicle that already has enough fuel to run it for the rest of its' usefull life. And then image that car getting into an accident and removing Cleveland.
this sig is deprecated
"America, we're not quite as bad as Stalin or the Nazis"
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.