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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There are very specific rules about *how* you can transform mass into energy. We call those rules “physics”. Right now, our nuclear reactions convert about 0.1% of the fuel’s mass to energy, but even this only works because of the specific way this particular fuel happens to be. The remaining materials are radioactive and there are no easy “reactions” we know of that let us get more energy out of them. This isn’t the best we can ever do according to the laws of physics, but it’s the best we know how to do with current technology.
If we ever learned how to easily & efficiently convert any matter into pure energy with 100% efficiency, we could power the entire world off of a few hundred pounds of stuff per year. Right now, we only know how to do that by combining matter with antimatter to annihilate it, but there’s no nearby natural source of large quantities of antimatter; we have to make it ourselves, which takes at least as much energy as it eventually releases when it annihilates (likely hundreds or thousands of times more due to inefficiency). It’s like a battery: you have to spend energy to charge it, so the energy you get when you discharge it isn’t really “free”. If we had a magic portal to a world made entirely out of antimatter, we could do what you’re describing.
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