Nuclear reaction

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Apologies if the tittle sounds confusing.

Let’s say you have two eggs, each containing a volume of 15 mL. When you smash two eggs together in a bowl, in theory you would have 30 mL worth of volume.

Could this be the same for atoms when they collide in a nuclear reactor? (The volume of egg would be substituted by a magnitude of energy, let’s say 20 J.)

Edit: Can’t believe my ass just confuse between nuclear fusion and fission đź’€. Sorry for the confusion and thank you for the answers!

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

What is it you’re asking?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes. And E=mc^2 means that the energy comes from *mass* lost, so your two 15 [**g**] eggs will weigh 29.9g and there will be a lot of light.

Anonymous 0 Comments

What you are refering to is NUCLEAR FUSION, while power plants works with NUCLEAR FISSION

also the point of nuclear fusion is that when you smash two atoms you release a neutron, generating a lot of energy
so the final “weight” will be smaller than the two weights combined
this reaction can not be controlled at the moment

in nuclear fission however you break an atom apart by “hitting” it with speed of light particles, generating two atoms which also generates a lot of energy

Anonymous 0 Comments

In your egg example, mass is conserved (the initial mass of the two eggs equals the mass of the smashed eggs).

In nuclear fusion, the mass is not conserved. Some of that mass is converted to energy. From Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence, E = mc^2 where c is the speed of light, we can see that a lot of energy comes from a little bit of mass. That is what makes nuclear fusion so desirable.