My knowledge about school level physics is admittedly not that fleshed out, but we were told that it is possible to convert mass to energy. My google-fu has sadly left me for my question here 🙁
So why can’t we just take e.g. nuclear waste and convert it to energy? After that so is my understanding it wouldn’t simply exist as matter anymore and wouldn’t require to store dangerous trash if you can convert it all to energy.
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You can’t arbitrarily just turn things into energy. You can only do that under very specific circumstances-like, say, within the nuclear reactor in the first place.
The reason the waste is waste is exactly because it’s in a form that’s difficult to turn into energy-so we can’t delete mass like that without first inputting absolutely colossal amounts of energy doing something first-like say, making antimatter to interact with it to destroy it.
Due to the amount of energy and effort that would be involved with doing so exceeding the amount of energy you’d get out of this process by several orders of magnitude, this is infeasible as a power source-and in terms of trash removal ‘load a rocket with it and shoot it into the sun or deep space’ would be cheaper option than attempting it.
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