why splitting uranium releases energy but we haven’t see any stray (random) nuclear explosion in natural ore deposits?

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And if splitting atom releases energy, why haven’t these energy break from their atom themselves? Isn’t that means the force that bind the atoms are bigger than the energy released?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If we assume such an event could happen, all the hypothetical uranium deposits that were sufficiently unstable enough to spontaneously explode did so when they formed back when the planet coalesced into a planet, or when the planets early geology shuffled subcritical masses into each other. What remains is the pockets of subcritical ore that have been subcritical long enough that enough of their unstable isotopes have slowly decayed and now they are very subcritical and no longer susceptible to causing such events. This has likely been the case for billions of years, if it ever occurred at all.

Sufficiently unstable naturally occurring radioactive ores are actually warm to the touch–so in a sense even the ore we’re left with *actually is releasing energy in exactly the way you describe*. It’s just not happening catastrophically fast any more (if it ever did at all).

An RTG (Radioisotope thermoelectric generator) is essentially a very simple generator that takes advantage of this heat to directly generate a small amount of electricity.

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