Where does all the energy come from?
In: 10
It turns out that an atoms don’t split quite evenly. In a nuclear reactor, a uranium atom decays into a thorium atom and a helium atom (roughly speaking). Uranium has mass 235.0439299, thorium has mass 231.03630, and the helium atom has mass 4.001506466. If you add all those up, though, you’ll notice that about 0.0061 mass is missing. What happened to it?
Atoms have very specific mass amounts, so we can’t just tack the extra onto one of the two new atoms. Instead, the leftover mass gets directly converted to energy according to the famous e=mc^(2) equation. Since the c^(2) factor is massive (roundabouts 18 zeros if you’re using meters per second), even the tiny amount of mass converted adds up *extremely* quickly. It adds up even faster when you consider that you aren’t just doing this to one atom, you’re doing it to a whole bomb or reactor core’s worth at a time and atoms are REALLY tiny (add another 20+ zeros)
Disclaimer: I got the exact numbers from a quick google search, so they might not be entirely accurate, but the process is.
Latest Answers