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

For the same reason you can make dynamite out of animal fat, feces, and dirt, and yet a pile of such industrial inputs does not spontaneously explode. Uranium has to be enriched, which is to say, the two naturally occuring isotopes have to be separated, and the fissile isotope, Uranium 235, has to be concentrated by getting rid of the non-fissile isotope, Uranium 238, until the concentration is high enough for the chain reaction to sustain itself.

In naturally-occuring Uranium, only about 0.7% of the element is U235, and in order to be used as fuel, it must be enriched to between 3 and 5%. In order to be used as a bomb, it must be refined to a MUCH higher purity, for example, the average enrichment of the Little Boy bomb exploded over Hiroshima was 80% U235. This, of course, also ignores that naturally occuring Uranium isn’t pure elemental Uranium, it’s compounded with other elements to form an ore, such as
[pitchblende](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uraninite).

So, you dig up the rocks, you subject them to chemical refining to remove the parts of the rocks which aren’t Uranium, and then you subject the pure Uranium to enrichment, which means you’re removing large volumes of the U238 isotope.

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