Where does all the energy come from?
In: 10
There’s a lot going on inside an atom, lots of stuff moving around. Normally it’s fine and doesn’t bother anything else, as all the energy is contained inside it. But you poke it the right way and it causes that energy to release.
Imagine you’ve got a powerful box fan. While it’s spinning you can move it around and set it on stuff in your house without destroying anything because it’s contained, just like an atom. It’s stable.
But if you poke it with a steel rod — an action that doesn’t take much energy for you to do — a fan blade is going to shear off and maybe go flying through its enclosure and hitting something with much more force than your little poke. You made it explode!
Keep in mind this is only a loose analogy — you’re not actually just shearing off the orbiting electrons or something. Since this is ELI5 I’m not going to go into specifically what’s happening, but the key point is that splitting an atom isn’t like splitting a log. You’re destabilizing a very energetic system.
If you want to know more, pbs spacetime at least one great video on it:
and if the idea that mass is just confined energy is a bit confusing for you, here’s a second video that includes the most intuitive example I’ve seen: a system of massless components that overall actually has mass: https://youtu.be/gSKzgpt4HBU
(edit: I know the potential energy bound up inside atoms isn’t best described as “stuff moving around” but I’m trying to avoid having to explain that so I’ve stuck to this loose analogy)
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