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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For the same reason you can’t just take energy and concert it into, say, cake. The equation you’re referencing tells you how to determine the amount of energy created when you turn mass into energy, it doesn’t guarantee that you can at-will convert one into the other. If you can devise a nuclear fusion reactor which works on trash, as you fuse that trash into some other byproduct, not all mass will add up. When you measure the missing mass and multiply it by the speed of light squared, you’ll find out how much energy the reaction yielded.
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