I would think that neutrons can break up any nucleus apart. Why not just use aluminium or iron. Is it because of E=mc^2 ? Greater mass equals greater energy? Would a bomb made of another material be less radioactive?
TIA
In: 30
You can break all atoms apart but not all release the same amount of energy in the process.
On the light end of the periodic table you have small atoms like hydrogen and helium.
At that point fusing two small atoms together actually gets you energy and breaking that larger atom apart takes energy.
At the the other end of the periodic table where the really heavy elements live you get the opposite: breaking big atoms into smaller ones gets you energy and fusing them together takes energy.
This is why you can have uranium or plutonium is fission bombs and hydrogen in fusion bombs. Both splitting atoms apart and fusing atoms together can release energy. fusion works for light atoms and fission for heavy ones.
Iron is actually the middle ground. if you keep fusing lighter elements together iron it where that process will stop working without a source of outside energy. Above Iron fission gets you energy and below it fusion works.
Of course you can just use any heavy element for a bomb. You need something that will keep the process going by itself. something that when hit with a neutron will release energy and more neutrons so you get nice chain reaction. Only a few isotopes work well for that. Other are to stable or too instable.
fission bombs are by their nature radioactive because the radioactiveness is what allows them to explode.
If you want to minimize radioactive fallout, you use either normal chemical bombs (or just kinetic if you want to go all sc-fi) or you use a fusion bomb. Of course the only way we have to set of a fusion reaction like that is with a fission bomb.
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