No coal, no current – Will we go back to the Stone Age?

On October 6, a shortage of coal in India was reported – only 4 days’ worth of coal reserves was remaining. More than half the power stations in India were on the alert for outages. At this rate, India would face a major power shortage that could potentially render the Covid-affected Indian economy completely destroyed.

Thus, this is prime time for alternative sources of energy to be put to use. These alternative sources of energy have been explored as potential substitutes to the good-old thermal power stations, but each has its own drawbacks and technological requirements, thus making it problematic to be utilised as a major supplier of power.

Antimatter, although sounding like something out of a science fiction plot, is a very real form of matter. True to its name, antimatter is pretty much the opposite of matter. For example, electrons are negatively charged, but their antimatter counterpart (known as the positrons), are positively charged and have the same mass as that of the electron. Although it sounds like a recent discovery, its existence had been predicted way back in 1928 by the physicist, Paul Dirac, when trying to reconcile the General Theory of Relativity and the Schrodinger Equationin Quantum Mechanics. Its existence had been confirmed in 1932 by Carl Anderson.

Now how would antimatter provide energy? When antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, they together disappear completely to form energy (usually in the form of light), a process physicists call “annihilation”. Thus, using annihilation, one can easily produce energy. The efficiency of energy production, in this case, is a staggering 100% (nuclear fission in reactors only produces about 1% of the energy present inside matter). It’s so powerful that one gram of matter and one gram of antimatter alone can produce an explosion about the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

Antimatter does look very promising but has its drawbacks. The finances required to make antimatter don’t look too promising. One gram of antimatter requires energy worth 62.5 trillion dollars and has been synthesised in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. It is stored inside a container with a vacuum and is suspended with electric and magnetic fields. CERN says that antimatter gives back only one billionth of the energy with which it was produced.

The future of antimatter as an energy alternative looks bleak and at best is unclear. At present, the cost of one gram of antimatter is more than thrice the GDP of the USA, which is the richest country in the world. However, if technology were to exist to produce antimatter more readily with fewer amounts of energy, for generating greater output, then antimatter might be of use (as you need only small amounts of regular matter to annihilate with antimatter). This would help combat the problem of supplying power, thus prompting scientists out there to perform research in this area.