http://49chevy.blogs.com/fusor/

Anyone ever visited this website? I know I have and find it to be very interesting. Soon I will be solving the world's energy problems!

It's got some plans for creating your own relatively cheap fusion reactor. I will shortly be fixing all the world's energy problems. Too bad there's not any viable net producing fusion reactors out there yet =D.

I'm not sure why I put this in this particular forum ...if a mod would like to move it then go for it.

I plan to build a small star in my backyard and harness it's power to run my computer during blackouts

"Hey, come look at this! I have a star in a magnetic bottle!" It's got great promise, just keep it the hell away from me.

qft IMO.

Anti-matter is the way of the future!

Production of this is ridiculously hard with current technology. I read somewhere that we're capable of producing less than 10 nanograms a year and it takes billions to produce.

Found it in Wiki:

Get started I say. I want my warp drive.

If we produced it in large quantities we'd blow our world out of existance. I don't think we can be trusted with such godly power yet. Antimatter bombs would make nuclear bombs look like m80s.

I'll take two.

Really? That's interesting, I've never heard that before. Why would splitting (or fusing?) an anti-nucleus (?) cause such a massive reaction? Are large enough anti-particles even known? I thought the only one we've created is antihydrogen?

An antimatter bomb is a device which mixes anti-matter with matter to cause a massive release of energy. E=mc²; the energy released by mixing 1g of matter with 1g of antimatter, destroying both is 1.8x10^14 Joules, or 49930843 killowatt-hours to use units easier to relate to.

I see. That's pretty interesting.

Yeah, how would such a device even exist though? This isn't Star Trek where we have "anti-matter containers."

If you keep the anti-electrons and anti-protons separate, they can be contained in a simple capacitive bottle.

And I suppose that's... easy?

We currently store anti-matter in a HUGE (and by huge I mean football fields in diamter) circular tube. They speed around it in a vacuum(sp? I never can spell it). E=MC^2 like WW said. C=the speed of light which is an amazingly huge number ...now squaring that adds insult to the injury. Let's say we had 50 pounds of that shit ...boom! =D.

Anyways, antimatter is the most powerful method we have right now to approach the speed of light, isn't it? I was watching a show on space propulsion and it said that antimatter explosions could possibly send ships at half of the speed of light. Now I'd like to see the ship that could take that kind of force and survive, though =P.

That sounds horribly wrong to me.

I think it depends entirely on the antiparticle being stored, as it relates to electrical charge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penning_trap

Gives an example, to a degree.

It sounds horribly wrong to you? I'm going to actually devote time out of my day to looking up references now, thanks :/. All I know is it must be stored in some sort of a vacuum or something like that otherwise the gaseous particles of the air will collide with the positrons etc. and produce energy.

Ah, I was wrong. That's the tevatron. http://adcon.fnal.gov/userb/www/tevatron/

I guess that's where we get it from. It's stored in a magnetic bottle.

That's it, you were describing Fermilab's Circular Particle Accelerator, which is one of the locations capable of producing Antiparticles.