Eli5: What exactly are the conditions that have to be met for a nuclear reaction to occur? Why does it have to involve Uranium 235 and similar isotopes? The world is made out of atoms. If we were to split the nuclei of the atoms of like a T shirt would it cause a nuclear reaction?
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A nuclear reaction can mean any change in the nucleus of an atom such as fission, fusion, natural decay….etc. I’m going to assume based on your question that you mean a self-sustaining fission reaction like what occurs in a nuclear reactor.
First you some amount of a fissile isotope. Fissile means when split, the atom emits the right amount of neutrons and those neutrons have the right amount of energy. There aren’t that many isotopes that fit that criteria, and uranium 235 is one of them. Then you need to arrange the fissile material in such a way that neutrons from the fission of the atoms actually hit (and thus split apart) more atoms of that material.
Technically you can split any atom with 2 or more protons in the nucleus (so anything other than hydrogen) but small, light atoms are very stable. They don’t want to split apart, it takes a ton of energy to get them to do so, and it’s not self-sustaining. Only heavy, unstable atoms (like uranium) actually want to split apart.
T-shirts are mostly made out of cotton. Cotton is organic material that’s mostly made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Those are all light atoms that are very stable and do not want to split apart, so you *could,* given the right conditions, split those atoms, but it would require a ton of energy and it would never be a self-sustaining reaction.
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