Title, how can such a small amount of metal be so powerful/potentially destructive? How is the power extracted? What makes it so dangerous? Any other interesting facts?
In: Physics
Gonna try to stick to eli5 as much as possible.
The reason why they are so powerful/destructive is because they release alot of energy. Now everything that exists is made up of energy, but in order for it to destroy something that energy needs to be released. There are many types on energy, the one released by Uranium in powerplants is Heat for example.
But why does Uranium release so much energy?
Its because mass is energy. Mass is what everything physical is made out of, mass is “stuff”. If something is more massive, it contains more energy. On earth we can refer to mass as weight, so you can say “1kg of mass”, but that only works on earth. If you take 1kg of Uranium to the moon it will still be the same amount of Uranium, but weigh less since the gravity is weaker. This is important because i will be using weight to explain what happens, just know that mass and weight are not the same.
So, what happens with Uranium in a bomb?
You split it. You use a start energy, and split the uranium. Why does this release energy? Its because the mass that remains is less. The extra mass has been converted into heat.
To illustrate, lets say you have 1kg of Uranium. Now you split all those uranium atoms, as in 1 atom becomes 2 atoms. If you did that with all Uranium atoms, gathered them up and weighed them again after splitting you would expect that to weigh 1kg again right?
But it doesnt. It weighs less, our 1kg of mass now weighs less. Lets say it weighs 990grams. What happened to those 10 grams of mass?
They became heat. But wait. Heat is a type of energy, and we used energy to split the Uranium. Wont that energy split even more Uranium?
It will! That is a chain reaction. In power plants and bombs you use this fact. The energy that splitting Uranium releases is enough to split even more Uranium. If you control this energy you get a powerplant. You release just enough so you can use it for power.
If you do not control, and let it just do its thing, you get a nuclear bomb. Kaboom!
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