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A few years ago scientists were able to form positrons using gold from a laser. Why can't we just use a sort of positrion plasma as a kind of fuel? I presume it would be too hard to contain them all because of the enormous positive electric feild but I am unsure.

Travis Wilson
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    Who wants to be the civilization that goes down in history as using gold for fuel ? :-) – StephenG - Help Ukraine Apr 24 '21 at 04:25
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    So, imagine burning 100 kW of coal to produce 1W of antimatter... it's almost like it makes more sense to use the coal as fuel instead. Whenever someone says they can use X to produce Y then it means that basically Y is just a kind of battery charge. There are a lot of different kinds of "batteries" from flywheels to hydrogen to, well.. batteries. So far the most efficient and dense battery we've found is lithium batteries. So the answer is that a Tesla battery pack is simply a better battery than positrons (they're also currently a better battery than hydrogen) – slebetman Apr 24 '21 at 15:28

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The methods we currently have to create it require very, very expensive equipment, are very, very energy inefficient, and can't create a lot of it which together make it almost unimaginably expensive. The most expensive material on Earth. Those two things make other disadvantages, being really dangerous and energy intensive to store, irrelevant.

NASA says that 1g of anti-matter costs 62 trillion dollars to make.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/prop12apr99_1

And the energy required to produce it given by this link: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/april-2015/ten-things-you-might-not-know-about-antimatter

equates to ~500 million times more energy to produce than the energy you would get out of it, which is just a little under 3 Hiroshima bombs.

For 62 trillion dollars, you could fund the Manhattan project then build a lot of Hiroshima bombs AND build a lot of nuclear power plants, AND build the uranium mine, AND build the uranium refinery, AND pay the staff to run them all.

DKNguyen
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    The internet says... You need to provide the link. – G. Smith Apr 24 '21 at 04:52
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    @G.Smith Done.. – DKNguyen Apr 24 '21 at 05:13
  • It doesn't take away from your point, but a uranium refinery was part of the Manhattan Project. – The Photon Apr 24 '21 at 13:52
  • But I was refering to a specific method which is not as expensive as you refer to. Also you didn't answer my question about containing just positrons, not anti-atoms. – Travis Wilson Apr 24 '21 at 15:24
  • @TravisWilson There isn't any fundamental difference in containing the two. Also, I could not find cost or energy efficiency numbers for comparison; only vague notions of efforts to improving it to make it less expensive. Note that less expensive doesn't mean not still insanely expensive. You could come up with a method that reduces the cost to 0.01% of what it was and it would still cost ~250 times more than the second most expensive material, Californium at $$25 million per gram. Finally, note that the method uses gold, which is free by comparison, at $60 per gram is already too expensive – DKNguyen Apr 24 '21 at 18:27