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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When the nuclear fuel undergoes fission, we actually do convert some mass to energy. That’s where the energy from the fission reaction comes from. The thing is, it’s only a very tiny amount of mass being converted to energy. In order to convert the rest to energy 100% efficiently, we would need antimatter to annihilate the nuclear waste. The problem with that is that in order to create antimatter, we would need a massive amount of energy, and we would also create an equal amount of matter, so we still have a byproduct in the end. We have only created a few thousand atoms of antihydrogen, nowhere near enough to annihilate all of the nuclear waste.
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