If an atom bomb makes a huge blast, do we have insane amounts of energy in our bodies that are just not accessible?

Question

Do all atoms have these massive amounts of potential energy or are there specific atoms used in these bombs?

In: Chemistry

Answer 1

Yes. Mass and energy are equivalent, and everyone knows Einsten’s famous equation E=mc^2 (the full euqation is actuall E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2) which tells us how to convert one into the other. if you take a 70kg human and convert all of that mass into energy with perfect efficiency, you’d get 6.29×10^18 joules. This is roughly the equivalent of 1500 megatons of TNT. That’s 30 times as much energy as the largest nuclear weapon ever tested and roughly 75,000 times as much energy as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now in reality, you could never do that with perfect efficiency. Furthermore, that atoms that make up our bodies are far too light to split apart and too heavy to fuse together (except for in the cores of the largest stars) so there’s no actual way to obtain any energy from them using nuclear reactions.