why splitting a tiny particle can cause such a devastating blast
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You actually split a lot of them at once.
Each one goes from a higher energy state to a lower energy one, and that releases energy because of conservation of energy. This energy is, compared to chemical explosives, *gigantic*. So there is a big boom.
Because that atom is made up of smaller particles that have the same charge, and same charges repel. So to bind them together, you need A LOT of energy. And when they do split, that energy is released.
Because there are a lot of them.
It might be better to not think of the size of individual atoms but how many of them there are in a give volume or mass of fuel.
I mean hydrocarbon molecules and oxygen molecules are pretty small too and you don’t wonder how the can cause explosions when mixed and ignited.
Chemical explosions are weaker than nuclear ones, but that is not down to the size of the individual molecules and atoms.
The difference comes from the fact that chemical reactions make use of the electromagnetic forces that hold atoms together in molecules while nuclear reactions deal with nuclear forces that hold the atomic nucleus together. In both case you induce them to go from one state to another that require less energy to maintain and give up the extra energy. (And in the process help the same reaction happen in other parts nearby.)
The forces holding atoms together are much stronger than the one holding molecules together, so there is a lot more energy to be gained from splitting or merging atoms than from chemical reactions.
Splitting one atom of Uranium gives you a minuscule amount of energy: 3.2×10 ^-11 J. But, in one gram of uranium, there’s 2.56×10 ^26 atoms, so keep multiplying that by say 5-10kg (10^3 grams) of typical warhead and you get a lot of energy.
There are about 10.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 atoms in a drop of water. And metals are even more dense. So the strength comes from the number of nuclear reactions, not from the individual event.
You know how the Sun mostly fuses Hydrogen into Helium? Well, much bigger and hotter stars can fuse the Helium into bigger atoms, and those into even bigger ones, and so on, up to iron. When stars get to iron, they can’t fuse it any more, because fusing iron requires more energy than it creates. Any atoms heavier than iron have to be made in supernovas. It just takes an unbelievable amount of energy to make big atoms, and supernovas are the only thing that can provide that much energy. (Some were probably created in the Big Bang, but that’s not happening any more.)
Some of those big atoms are stable, like gold. (If you have a gold ring, almost all of that gold was probably formed in a supernova a very, very long time ago.) Some of those atoms are not stable, like Uranium. Uranium wants to decay, which is why it’s radioactive. Usually it just slowly splits itself into Thorium, then Radium, and a long chain of other stuff, and eventually into lead, which is stable. That process gives off energy, but it takes a long time (billions of years), so it’s not a big deal.
However, if you put the proper kinds of atoms together in the proper way, one that decays can give off particles that hit others and split them, and those give off particles that split others, and so on, and they all release a bunch of energy in a really short amount of time (a matter of microseconds.) That’s what causes the devastating blast from an atomic bomb.
And, if you put the right kind of Hydrogen (usually Deuterium and Tritium) into exactly the right place in the bomb, at exactly the right time, you can cause it to fuse into Helium, just like in the sun. That’s how a Hydrogen bomb works. It actually uses a “regular” atomic bomb as a trigger to create a *really small, really quick* star.
in a normal chemical reaction, the energy you get out is stored in the bond between the various atoms and molecules. the energy of electrons clinging onto much larger nuclei.
when you perform nuclear fission, you’re actually destroying matter. you end up with less material than when you started. that missing matter was converted, in its entirety, into energy. how much energy? *a lot* E=mc^2 is actually for calculating it.
to help understand. in SI units. energy is joules (1 joule will lift an apple 1 meter straight up), mass is in kilograms (a textbook is 1-2 kg), and C is *the speed of light* (about 300 *million* meters per second) which is then squared.
a nuclear weapon is somewhere north of 15 kgs of material that scientists and engineers are trying to fission as quickly and violently as possible.
Your premise is wrong. A single splitting particle is powerful, but does not create a devastating blast. For that you would need a literal chain reaction of splitting particles. I’m talking weighable grams of the stuff instead of a handful particles.
The force which holds the parts of an atom’s nucleus together is extremely powerful but only works for very, very short distances. The protons don’t really want to stay together at all because of charge repulsion (which is pretty powerful when things are that close), so the force keeping them together is extremely high. When you smack a nucleus with a neutron (or a lot of energy somehow), it disrupts that very fine balance of energies, allowing (or forcing) a proton (or many protons) to migrate far enough away from the zone of nuclear force dominance into a region where charge repulsion exerts itself. Often, two smaller nucleii are the result (two new elements are created from the breakup of the one once-larger original one), so it isn’t just one proton flying away, it is a splitting of an atom into two unequal halves. The energy that was keeping the nucleus intact (all the protons and neutrons together) is released. It is a very large amount of energy even from one very tiny event.
The big problem from an energy release standpoint is that the release of energy from one event, and the associated rapid travel of the ejected bits, is enough to cause several other such collision and breakup events to happen, so you get a sudden and roughly simultaneous breakdown of a huge number of nucleii.
There is also a flip side to this process, where we can combine small nucleii together and make bigger molecules. The reason that each method can release a lot of energy is that there is a middle size (the size of an iron atom, which is one reason iron is such a common element) where adding to the nucleus or removing from the nucleus costs more energy than it releases. Elements larger than iron (element #26) release more energy when they break apart whereas elements smaller than iron release energy when combined. Iron sits at the bottom of an energy valley, basically. One side releases energy by combining, and the other side releases energy by splitting.
The breaking apart process is called fission. The adding together process is called fusion. Both require a lot of energy to get started but once they get going, they release more energy than they use to happen, and if the atoms are close enough together, the process feeds on itself, until the atoms get flung apart far enough that collisions with other atoms becomes unlikely. The number of atoms involved is generally HUGE, as is the energy being released by each atom, so KABOOM. It makes chemical reactions seem tame and weak, by comparison (yet chemical reactions are still pretty dangerous things even if not even close to the energy levels released by nuclear reactions).
1. Attach two baseballs to each other with string.
2. Put some wine glasses on the floor.
3. Holding the middle of the string, hold the baseballs about 4 or 5 feet above the wine glasses
4. Cut the string
5. Read the other answers
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