[pfdietz]

The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will.

Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.

[garciasn]

There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T.

According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...

[thaumasiotes]

> According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."

Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.

Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.

(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)

[adrianN]

The relevant cost for the buyer is how much they need to pay to obtain the object. So far we haven't discovered any primordial antimatter deposits that we could mine, so creating it from scratch is the only way.

[garciasn]

Please do take it up w/Doser from CERN and/or the author of the source article; I just was parroting what he was quoted as saying.