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

You do get spontaneous fission of uranium-235, it’s very rare but does occur. U-235 only makes up 0.7% of all uranium so it’s a rare occurrence in a rare isotope so only detected if you really go looking for it.

Nuclear explosions cannot occur with natural uranium, you need to enrich the U-235 isotope to above 75% and even then it doesn’t spontaneously explode as a mushroom cloud. As soon as the chain reaction starts the U-235 would heat up to a gas, expand and fission would stop.

The naturally occurring reactors in Oklo that have been mentioned were not explosions. The isotope ratio was sufficiently high 2 billion years ago that if water flowed through a concentrated pocket of uranium that it could sustain a chain of fission events like that used in commercial nuclear reactors. They lasted something like 30 minutes before the ore got hot enough to boil off the water and then they stopped. Fuel cooled, water flowed again and the processing repeated again.

The atoms after fission are arranged in a more stable manner than before fission. The difference in stability is the energy released (in the form of kinetic energy of the fission products-they are moving faster than the U-235 atom prior to fission).

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