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Comment by Ziggy_Zaggy | Hacker News Reader

Yet nuclear still seems to be a front-runner candidate for net-zero-carbon solutions in the arena of "almost always online" base-load. AKA - what solutions are best at carrying the base-load in low-daylight or low-wind scenarios...?

And datacenters for LLM applications...? How much land will be required to build a power plant facility to power each new LLM datacenter...? What solution carries that base-load during the low-light or low-wind time-periods...?

If this is the status-quo in the US now regarding nuclear fission tech then don't look now but NASA and other nations R&D sectors are already making significant progress towards anti-matter solutions. Luddites beware - the risks with new high-energy tech doesn't get any less scary moving forward but they DO score better on net-zero-carbon metrics.

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I cannot stress this enough: anti-matter is not a power source. It never will be, on account of "it doesn't exist in our universe naturally".

You cannot mine anti-matter, you cannot even efficiently make it and you certainly can't store it.

You can mine antimatter, in particle accelerators. One can think of energy as made up of matter and antimatter, it just needs to be separated.

And of course they do store it. Charged antimatter can be stored in magnetic fields, for example.

No, you can't. Particle accelerators make anti-matter. And they do so extremely inefficiently. This is not an energy source: it's at best, a conversion or storage system. Making anti-matter is an inefficient, energy losing process, it is not a fuel source.

And the storage sucks: the longest anti-matter confinement time is 405 days in a Penning trap and we've only done so for amounts measured in total count of atoms, in the thousands. Not even micrograms.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

We will probably mine antimatter near the sun, where energy is virtually free.

It's as much an energy source as anything. You would also spend more energy than you got out if you tried to mine coal in your backyard.

if your power demand is for neural networks in data centers, you can just turn the data center off when the sun goes down and reroute users' queries to a data center on the other side of the planet. as i understand it, though, things like aluminum smelters, cement kilns, and haber-bosch ammonia plants are not quite so forgiving of power intermittency

your comments about antimatter make it clear that you have no idea what you're talking about

as for baseload, the current frontrunner for dark nights with no wind seems to be batteries

Feel free to attempt to educate me on antimatter then ofc. Otherwise, I'll continue to consume the NASA public R&D slides while laughing off silly comments.

maybe consume an introductory physics textbook instead of slides

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