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

A nuclear explosion is kind of like a traffic jam. Radioactive atoms like uranium naturally emit high energy particles every so often, just like cars naturally have to brake quickly every so often on the freeway, maybe somebody cut someone else off or an animal ran across the road.

If another car is close enough behind the first car, that car will have to brake suddenly too. Similarly, if another nuclear fuel atom is close enough to the first one, it may get hit by the emitted particle and burst apart, releasing more high energy particles.

However, in normal circumstances, both cars on the freeway and nuclear fuel atoms are too spread out to sustain this chain reaction for very long, so nothing really happens. One car having to slow down briefly isn’t going to cause much chaos, and one uranium atom splitting won’t release much energy.

Only once you reach a certain density of cars all trying to use the freeway at once do you start to have the potential for major traffic buildup, and once you reach that point, BOOM. Traffic jams happen like that.

Likewise, once you get enough nuclear fuel atoms close together in high enough concentration, you reach a point called “criticality” when nuclear chain reactions can spontaneously occur.

The answer to your question is that viable nuclear fuels just don’t really exist in such high concentrations in nature. Specific isotopes of uranium are needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction because the isotope determines the possible components they can break apart into when they split, and in nature those isotopes are found mixed together with lots of other uranium isotopes and minerals. Nuclear fuels undergo a refining process which removes all the other stuff and leaves mostly just the isotope we want, and then the fuel rods are put into specialized chambers with particle reflectors and other rods in the reactor in order to finally reach criticality and start the reaction.

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