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

Same reason if you spread gunpowder across a table it’ll burn, but if you pack it tight and ignite it it’ll explode.

Density.

Uranium atoms are splitting all the time, but they don’t form chain-reactions very often because they’re not packed tight, and the uranium ore (Pitchblend) isn’t in a very pure form either.

Natural ore deposits are basically radioactive dirt, and they get warm from their reactions and can stay that way for millions of years.

Once you dig up that dirt and strip out the uranium and put it all together, it starts getting a lot hotter (flash-boil water to steam levels of hotter)

In general Uranium isn’t unstable enough to make a bomb though.
For that, you want Plutonium, which is generally found as a byproduct of uranium decay.
As the uranium breaks down due to its own radiation, it tends to form several other materials, most of which are short lived and unstable.

Isolate the Plutonium from that, get loads of it together (a few pounds will do) and you’ll find it’s a hell of a lot more radioactive than uranium, which is what you want for a bomb, because what you basically want is a material which is a house-of-cards waiting to be knocked down all at once.
Squeeze it all together tight enough, and it’ll explode if you have enough of it in one place.
The stray neutrons from its instability have nowhere to go but smack into another unstable atom, which makes more neutrons, and breaks up more atoms, and more and more until the whole thing is coming apart, rapidly releasing huge amounts of energy in the form of heat

In a nuclear bomb, about 5 – 15 percent of the mass will undergo decay like this during the detonation, and that’s a hell of a lot of energy at once.

TLDR, natural uranium deposits aren’t packed tight enough, or unstable enough to explode.

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