Vannak
Suicidesoldier#1
Vannak
We're literally on the technological cusp of being able to produce black hole engines, which can be made as energy efficient as we really want. Containment issues are important, but we can pretty much toss any kind of mass, including the waste from nuclear fission, and get clean energy.
They'll also be bright neutrino emitters, momentum tunable to a certain degree. It'll be amazing we can figure out how neutrinos effect nuclear decay, build more effective detectors, I can even imagine the medical benefits with a high emission source. I'm going to start drooling. But yeah, we're probably going to be totally fine energy wise.
Gamma radiation is hardly what I'd call clean or even usable energy, due to it's high penetration.
Also, I think we are a ways away.Well, rather than reading a scifi article about it, you could read the actual paper that's linked there. The io9 article isn't a scientific opinion.
Anyways, these black holes are tunable. Feed them extra mass and they slow down, and give off lower energy light. Also, I haven't done the calculation but I'm pretty sure we wouldn't use something capable of giving off gamma rays because they'd be more likely to emit neutrinos way before we get to gamma rays, and neutrinos aren't going to help out with the energy collection.
Neutrinos wouldn't really help either. O_o
We could have something like the wall of a fusion reactor though, if those ever become a reality.
Also with containment- I'd say that's the number one problem.
They'll just consume all the mass around them- suspended by magnets, maybe, depending on the material or it's properties- I hear that they're usually super cold though, so it may not work- or it might work better.
You could maybe do it in space- also, how would you absorb more mass?
I was pretty sure that black holes only got their energy from their current levels of mass, and that adding mass was more or less just gravity working.
I guess it might gain more if you had a stabilized version.
But even so you've got the whole hyper penetrating laser beam of radiation problem. O_o
Plus it would take a huge amount of energy.
If you started with a small one you might be able to make successively bigger ones though, until you had a reasonably sized one.