How much more powerful would an antimatter bomb/power plant/rocket be than a nuclear fission/fusion one?
Big difference. Nuclear explosions are not 100% efficient in turning the fissile material into “Bang!”. Antimatter coming into contact with Matter is very different proposition. It will result in mutual annihilation. That is, total wipeout of both objects with no ashes or waste products. This is because they would both be instantaneously turned into energy – in this case mainly heat and light. There would be a blast wave extending beyond the annihilation site that would destroy anything material in range and the radiated heat would finish off anything remaining. The amount of energy released by an object of about 1kg would probably turn the planet Earth into a cloud of dust. I don’t think that the world’s existing nuclear arsenal would do more than wipe life off of the surface of the planet even if they were all detonated at once. The idea of a Start Trek type anti-matter engine is a very long way into the future. To start with – how do you convert mutually annihilating material into s
Antimatter is more powerful per lb, than fission or fusiion, but not as powerful as you might expect. One pound of antimatter would yield an explosion of 19.5 megatons. The Hiroshima bomb (fission) yielded only 13 kilotons. Nagasaki yielded 20 kilotons. But the largest bomb ever exploded by the USA (the Bravo bomb, at Bikini Atoll) was a fusion bomb that yielded about 15-20 megatons. At a weight of 23,000 lbs of fuel, and a yield comparable to your 1 lbs of antimatter, I guess the answer to your question is that antimatter is about 20,000 times more powerful per lb. than a fusion bomb.
Using e=mc^2, 1g of antimatter annihilating 1g of matter produces 2 * 9E10 ergs. An h-bomb contains a minimum of about 22kg of fissile material (I read somewhere that it needs about this amount to create the correct conditions – can’t remember where) so you can see that matter/antimatter is a lot more powerful.
In theory Antimatter is much more powerful than the same amount of matter 10000000000 x TNT 1000 x Fission bomb 100 x Fusion bomb However in a reaction approx 50% of the energy is lost through release of non-reactive neutrinos So its a lot bigger however you look at it Thank gosh for the containment field around the warp reactor in Star Trek!
