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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 354238" data-attributes="member: 5990">You're confusing energy with free energy; it's a very critical difference.  Nuclear energy derives from the fact that most nuclei are not as quite stable as they could be (though not by much), and in fact they all will eventually work their way to the ground state nucleus by hook or by crook, to an iron isotope. In a broad hand-waving sense, yes, the reason this is a slow and controllable process is chiefly that the difference between the energies of most nuclei and the iron "ground state" is really only a very, very small fraction of the rest mass, so nuclear reactions only overcome the effective activation enery barrier for surrounding nuclei in very special cases, such as stellar cores and fission reactors.In the real world, antimatter does not allow you to get at any free energy.  You have to put as much energy into creating that antimatter (and an equal quantity of matter) as you get out of it in the annihilation reaction.  Antimatter technology can thus only produce storage cells, not generators.Now if there were an easy way to convert rest mass into free energy, that would essentially be the same as having the activation energy for rest mass conversion be quite low compared to the energy stored in the matter.  Analogous situations in the real world are things like tanks of gasoline, TNT, and piles of snow sitting on top of mountains.  A little bit of energy put into the system in the right way gets a lot out.Of course it is possible to store gasoline and TNT safely, and not all piles of snow sitting on mountains turn into avalanches, but sometimes accidents happen.  Even if the trigger conditions are fairly difficult to achieve, if you throw enough energy at it, it will happen.In this hypothetical world where rest mass converts to free energy, what you have effectively is a world made out of TNT.  Sure, not everything detonates it, and you probably can do some things with the TNT safely, if you're careful, but one day, someone somewhere will goof up.  And it just takes that one goof up.  Boom.</blockquote>

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