Why does splitting an atom create energy? And why is it so much energy?
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Well, energy can’t be created or destroyed, but in this case, it gets released from one ‘form’ to another.
Imagine you are holding a heavy ball tied to a string, and you spin the ball above your head. You are adding energy into the system, but not creating it. You are sort of an atom.
What would happen if someone cut the string? The ball will fly off and smash into a window. The heavier the ball y, the worse the damage will be.
What if you had 245 heavy balls attached to strings, and each ball has a small blade attache to it? As long as only you are spinning them, it probably will be OK, though once in a while a ball mich get cut off and fly away. This is kind of what radioactive means, but very simplified.
And if you have hundreds, thousands, millions of people standing, each spinning 245 heavy, bladed balls above their head, things are bound to get messy! As long as each keeps a distance, it might be OK, though stray balls will fly off once in a while. But once you get enough people to smoosh together, their balls all fly off, setting off a chain reaction of flying, spinning, heavy, bladed balls everywhere!
This is a nuclear chain reaction.
This is an interesting question, because sometimes you get energy by pushing atoms together, *i.e.*, fusion, and sometime you get energy by splitting atoms apart, *i.e.*, fission.
There is a curve of what is called “binding energy per nucleon,” and it maxes out at ~~tin~~ *iron*, ~~which unsurprisingly has the most stable isotopes~~.
If you push two atoms together to make something smaller than tin, like 2 hydrogens to make a helium, you get A LOT of energy. If you split an atom apart to get two elements heavier than tin, you get some energy out. Still a lot, but not nearly as much.
The force that holds component protons and neutrons together – the strong nuclear force – is *very, uh,* strong.
It’s like a bunch of springs between all the components. When the atoms reconfigure, there are extra springs left over and the energy has to go somewhere. It takes the form of atomic kinetic – otherwise known as thermal – energy.
The energy is just bound into the fabric of the fuel and widely distributed, so you get high energy densities across the fuel source, without ridiculously volatile energy boundaries that are qualitatively hard to maintain.
It doesn’t create energy. It releases the energy that is holding the particle together. That just happens to be a substantial amount of energy because holding particles so tightly is a lot of work.
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