Eli5 Do nukes really split an atom to explode?
In: Technology
Atom bombs like the ones dropped in WW2 shoot a neutron at a highly unstable uranium atom which causes a chain reaction releasing a ton of energy and light in split second
While nukes take that then use that to fuse 2 hydrogen atoms together making new helium atoms and releasing even more energy
If it’s a fission explosion then yes. There are isotopes of atoms (they have the same number of protons but different number of neutrons) that are very unstable and they are just itching to reach a stable state. When they’re hit with a high energy particle they break up to try to reach that stable state – they break into other elements and also release a ton of energy in the process.
Not a *single* atom, no, but all nuclear weapons function at least partially on splitting atoms in order to generate an immense amount of heat.
Fission-based weapons (typically called atomic weapons) function exclusively on fission processes, typically fissioning enriched uranium or plutonium fuel.
Most modern weapons in the US arsenal, however, are combination fission-fusion warheads (commonly just called fusion weapons or hydrogen bombs), where you use a small fission reaction (same as in older atomic weapons) to kickstart a secondary fusion reaction. This gives the warhead a lot higher power-to-weight ratio (as the fusion fuel is hydrogen).
Not one atom, lots of atoms. You get a surprising amount of energy by splitting *certain types of* atoms – compared to the other things atoms can do, like chemical reactions – but it’s still an atom-sized bit of energy, so you need lots of atoms to have lots of energy.
You get more energy than you would get from a bomb that used chemical reactions.
The nukes used in World War II split about a trillion trillion atoms each, in less than a millisecond, to produce that power. So it’s not “an atom.” But it is many atoms.
The trick of it is, some atoms are pretty easy to split, and their splitting can cause more atoms of the same type to split. So the splitting of a few dozens of atoms (which you can do sort of on command with what is known as a neutron initiator) quickly escalates into the splitting of trillions and trillions of atoms.
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