Planetside application of Matter/Anti-Matter Reactors.

[RobFox]

Having been away from Trek for a while, and thoroughly disenchanted by the new Star Trek; I have turned my attention away from the starships and the brave boys and girls that fly them, and rather to the little we know about Federation society in the 24th Century...

Anyway; I’ve had a think about the application of an M/AM reactor on Earth or any other planet. I envisage a power station; all shiny and architecturally interesting in the middle of the countryside. In the middle of the building we have the ‘reactor pit’, and the equivalent of a warp core in said pit. Half way down this pit, and underground, we have the stations main control room (like Main Engineering on a Starship, but a bit larger and more complex I imagine). As part of the whole paradigm within the UFP of making things beautiful, you can have guided tours round the top of this core pit, (as well as the rest of the surface building) which is covered only by a force field, but also, out of sight on the roof of the building above, a huge duralanium cap, held on the roof by electromagnets which, if any power interruption, immediately release the cap to secure the core.

Back down to the bottom of the pit, we have the M/AM conduits, which lead to the M/AM tanks buried deep beneath the Earth. These are refilled, when needs must, with discrete filling pipes in the building above. The pit is dotted with forcefield generators, but as a last resort, in a case of containment failure, the core is ejected downwards, down a short tube into a huge excavated explosion chamber which is encased in superunobtanium to assist the force fields in containing the blast. The ejection tube is covered by a gravity controlled cap similar to the one at the top of the reactor pit. An explosion would be catastrophic to the localised area, but little more than that, and let’s face it, warp core explosions are, outside our hero ships in their unique situations, very rare.

The power created from this core goes back up into the surface building before being routed wherever it is needed by the planets power grid.

Is this realistic? How does the power needed to push a starship at Warp 9 translate to a planet? Would Earth need three or four, nine or ten, or only one? Does the danger of a core exploding outweigh the huge benefits that the large amount of power would create?

Regards.
--R

 

[blssdwlf]

My guess is that for planetary power generation the starfleet engineers would tap into a combination of geothermal, nuclear fusion and solar power. At least in "The Voyage Home" that was the implication. Antimatter would be far more volatile for planetary ops IMO but would make a good spaceship power source (with dilithium).

 

[shipfisher]

The Uxali race in the Delta Quadrant didn't make a very good go of utilizing the antimatter tech from the 2067 UESPA probe Friendship One in the Voyager episode of the same name. They pretty much cooked their planet. That aside, I suppose it all comes down to how cost effective the generation of antimatter is - ie. can you make more energy with it than it took to create it. If a race at the technological level of the Uxali were proceeding ahead with an antimatter fueled power grid, then I suspect that Friendship One provided them with tech info on how to generate it in commercial quantities in a manner well into the net energy positive side of the ledger books. It seems unlikely that complex deep space refineries, harvesting antimatter from the interstellar reaches, were involved here.

 

[Timo]

Yeah. The thing is, antimatter isn't a power source.

Antimatter is merely a supposedly efficient means of storing power. But you can't mine antimatter, since it doesn't exist in nature, unlike oil or uranium. You can merely convert some existing type of stored or constantly flowing energy into antimatter, for quick release at a later date.

I can't imagine many power systems on Earth requiring a quick release of energy. There would instead be a steady demand, which would be much better met by a steady supply such as a fusion reactor or a solar power collector. An antimatter reactor couldn't supply any more power than the fusion reactors or solar panels on the average, because all the power coming out of antimatter would first have to be put into the antimatter by means of said fusion reactors or solar panels.

Some military installations might have antimatter batteries buried somewhere, since big shields and anti-starship cannon might require high peak power at extremely irregular but usually extremely long intervals. But most industries probably couldn't afford to operate in a manner that would call for such sudden bursts of power.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shipfisher]

All too true Timo, however here I've adopted the perhaps unenviable position of trying to rationalize a Voyager script detail. After all, any matter is stored energy isn't it? If you can come up with some free lunch process of cracking it apart, then anything is a power source, not just heavy isotopes of hydrogen and down the energy release food chain from there.

An antimatter based power supply grid obviously seemed viable to the Uxali, however seeing how it turned out for them, they may well be the village idiots of the delta quadrant...

 

[blssdwlf]

Well it only takes one loss of containment to have something significantly worse than a nuclear meltdown. The Uxali seemed to have ignored the risks in favor of an antimatter grid and had an accident. Presumably Federation engineers didn't make the same mistake.

 

[shipfisher]

Just to respond to RobFox's original post, if an antimatter power plant was a doable deal, I'd say you've thought out some of the possible nuts'n'bolts details quite well.

 

[Captain Robert April]

M/AM reactors seem to only be used for high energy applications, like warp drives. For simple things like lighting up the town, fusion reactors seem to be the way to go.

 

[shipfisher]

As well thought out as your M/AM reactor is RF, I think the fusion aficionados in the crowd are carrying the day here. I've always used the Uxali example as justification for thinking easily created antimatter is a staple of the trekverse. Now I'm more inclined to think they are (were? will be?) in fact the village idiots of the delta quadrant, with ideological or socio-political forces being involved in the adoption of an antimatter based power infrastructure. Perhaps the only way to maintain a centralized, controlled and profitable energy distribution system was to force its dependence on a substance only available from heavily subsidized and inefficient government supply facilities, or the Uxali equivalent of petrochemical corporations that wanted to put the kibosh on cleaner, greener, decentralized ( and unbillable) power options (ie. a BTTF Doc Brown style Mr. Fusion perhaps) - we all know what ecological disasters that can lead to (cough-BP-cough).

A fusion based power supply paradigm for the federation is probably the most likely. In a Voyager episode referenced elsewhere in these forums, deuterium depletion appears to be what gets Janeway and co. the most sweaty. There's plenty of heavy isotopes of hydrogen around for the taking. Apart from seawater and lunar regolith, etc., extra-solar planet searches have found a preponderance of gas giants out there. Most, if not all solar systems would seem to have big refueling depots in their outer reaches. Perhaps bussard collectors are multi-purpose devices, with the collection mode reserved for upper atmosphere skimming runs (involving some ionization cycle) at all those Jupiters and Saturns when required. The TNG tech manual mentioned those annular AM generators in the bowels of the galaxy class ships for emergency situations - use of them would probably require a protracted stay in orbit around a gas giant planet in this scenario.

UFP antimatter production would certainly be more cost effective than current tech projections of roughly $250 million US for 10 milligrams (quoted in a NASA article somewhere) but still require more energy input than resultant output bang - keeping it restricted to applications like space warping drives and high yield weapons systems.

Perhaps romulan quantum singularity tech (IMO, a nice trek-lore touch would see this first used as the basis for the dissipating from the inside plasma weapon in TOS: Balance of Terror) or the zero point cores most likely following on from quantum torpedo development represent the advent of something closer to a free lunch in the energy supply saga.

 

[Timo]

It might well be that the industries of the UFP would be interested in high output power sources, that is, powerplants or batteries that would release lots of energy at once even if not on the average - but they have been deterred from pursuing those by a series of disasters. Antimatter could easily go wrong (and may have been what went wrong at Praxis), but we also hear of "polaric ion power" from VOY "Time and Again" being a disaster of such proportions that even the Romulans agreed to drop it. The subspace weapons ban of ST:INS might have to do with a similar failure in adopting subspace energy taps for another "free energy cheat" on a large scale, since small scale weapons with a subspace component to them seem to be standard Starfleet arsenal as such.

So, everybody dabbles in exotic paths to lots of free power, and everybody learns sooner or later that energy is always going to be abundant and the hunger for power should be moderated. This because the "shortcuts" carry high risks which only in hindsight are deemed inappropriate for the gain: the current UFP disdains the pursuit of polaric ion power in its own time, but also Earth's pursuit of fission power in the 20th century, and perhaps for a good reason.

Antimatter power might well have been all the fad in the postwar or immediate prewar Earth and thus included in the Friendship 1 offer for better life. But something in the late 21st century may have weaned Earth from that habit; nothing as bad as what the Uxali did, but something similar, since it's a bit unlikely that the Uxali would have created an antimatter power infrastructure and the adjoining philosophy if all the probe offered them was plans for a spacecraft antimatter powerplant (and the adjoining philosophy).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shipfisher]

Considering your comments Timo, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the Uxali after all. It's fair to say that Friendship One was launched when the understanding of subspace mechanics was in its infancy for earth scientists. Maybe they had hatched up some dodgy, polaric ion type AM generator that used subspace in some inherently unstable way and this tech was enthusiastically bundled aboard Friendship One, only to be abandoned soon afterward due to some mishap revealing the unavoidable dangers involved.

 

[Wingsley]

One should also consider the question from another angle:

Is there anything in TREK to verify that 23rd- or 24th-century residences, businesses or government facilities even rely on a "power grid"? Maybe by then, people wise up and stop paying utility companies for power they can generate individually, "off the grid". If you want to see any example of how this would work, take a look at this YouTube video presentation of the American Road Journal: "Solar hydrogen home Michael Strizki".

 

[bryce]

One should also consider the question from another angle:

Is there anything in TREK to verify that 23rd- or 24th-century residences, businesses or government facilities even rely on a "power grid"? Maybe by then, people wise up and stop paying utility companies for power they can generate individually, "off the grid". If you want to see any example of how this would work, take a look at this YouTube video presentation of the American Road Journal: "Solar hydrogen home Michael Strizki".

^Unfortunately they probably *do* have something like a - well, world-wide - power grid, since it was sabotaged in DS9...

But in the future, yeah, I'd expect that futuristic materials would allow a house to be made out of solar power-generating materials (or coated with solar power generating paint)...combine that with one of those futuristic miniaturized house fusion reactors we heard about in TNG - and there would be no need - or very little need - to get any extra power from a grid. (Or maybe individual homes are *part* of the power generation grid...but something like that would be partially de-centralized, and therefore impossible to completely disable from a single location...)

But maybe those home fusion reactors are only used on colony worlds...? But still, I think it would make send that a futuristic house would at least get some of it's power from solar - and maybe some more from wind and geothermal power...so that only a little power would need to be imported - if any at all. (But then again - we don't know the power requirements of a 23rd or 24th century Federation home...perhaps with things like home replicators and even home holodecks (or transporters) - the power requirements could be enormous.

 

[Timo]

and there would be no need - or very little need - to get any extra power from a grid.

But no way to share extra power, either. Everything the households would produce would have to be stored in the households, or wasted, even though it might be better spent right over the fence, or then a few thousand kilometers away. This would probably not be a problem in terms of energy costs, since the UFP would have several varieties of free energy available; it would mostly be a problem of "energy exhaust", of too much energy being stored and spent both in one place and overall due to the inability to share, of too much waste heat being generated.

Yes, replicators, holodecks and transporters might consume vast amounts of power. They'd probably do it in very inconvenient waves, too: there'd be peaks during commuting hours, during dinnertimes, during those hours when holotainment is in the greatest demand and availability (probably the idle hours if the evening when natural light levels are low). Assuming that the standards of living and lifestyles are pretty much global in the 24th century, the only way to balance those spikes would be to have a global power network. Again, it wouldn't be the consumption as such, it would be the need to avoid overcapacity and waste heat.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shipfisher]

I've just seen a news item on TV about a stadium in Japan where they're reclaiming the energy from turnstiles at the gates and foot-pads under jumping people in the stands to charge hand flashlights/torches for the night games and events. Apply that thinking across society and add a few centuries to the tech and imagine the possibilities.

 

[JoeFromEarth]

When using energy, you want to get it from a reliable and abundant source. For spaceships traveling between star systems, the only abundant source if the random atoms of hydrogen picked up by the bussard collectors. To get the most energy out of this matter (essentially E=MC2) you combine it with antimatter, and you'll get twice the energy (2E = MC2 + MC2, the combined matter of both the hydrogen and antihydrogen).

Planetside, the most abundant energy would be geothermal and solar. Therefore you'd expect to see either used often. Antimatter would be too much work to create. Of course, you'd have to create it to use as fuel (do they ever look for antimatter on Voyager, or are they only looking for dilithium?) for your starships.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Well, in one particularly mind numbing incident, they mentioned that they were running out of deuterium and were quite overjoyed when they found a planet with large deposits of deuterium.



Why did they bother having a scientific adviser if they clearly didn't listen to him? Low on deuterium? Just park your ass in orbit of a gas giant and crank up the Bussards, you'll have more deuterium in a few hours than you did when you left spacedock.

 

[Timo]

How would parking next to a gas giant be any different from parking on the surface of a rock dwarf?

The rock dwarf is what they had available for a source of (concentrated) deuterium. They were turned away from most star systems; if the one they approached had no gas giants or watery comets, then too bad. Although those wouldn't offer concentrated deuterium, which must have been much more desirable than the normal dilute stuff that a starving starship might not have the resources to concentrate.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

Or just collect hydrogen/deuterium from the upper atmosphere of every class M planet they enter orbit of. Make topping off the tank a standard procedure.

.

 

[JarodRussell]

Planetside application of Matter/Anti-Matter Reactors

Wouldn't happen. Too dangerous, and not needed. Every energy needed on planets can come from fusion, wind, water and especially solar energy.

Antimatter is for spaceships.