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CERN Ups Antimatter Confinement Record to 15+ Minutes
A team at CERN has vastly increased its ability to confine antimatter, says an article published today at Scientific American. Last year, the same researchers managed to trap atoms of antihydrogen. "But," says the SciAm report, "the antihydrogen had at that time been confined for less than two tenths of a second. That interval has now been extended by a factor of more than 5,000. In a study published online June 5 in Nature Physics, the ALPHA group reports having confined antihydrogen for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. The more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10, is 1,000 seconds."
The most thorough treatment of the subject I've seen is that of Robert Forward (who did a study on the subject commissioned by the military). His findings were to the effect that if antimatter production were treated as an engineering problem rather than a scientific one, production of useful quantities would be entirely feasible using incremental and reasonably-foreseen advances on existing technology.
Whether or not you buy his argument in full, there's no doubt that we throw away most of the energy involved in creating antimatter, and much of that needlessly (as we only know how to capture a very small portion of the results). As such, the claim that "there's no changing" the power requirements is false on its face.