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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Consider it like setting up a massive domino layout. there’s alot of stored up energy there.
if you wait a million years and didnt push those dominos will become weaker and just break in half, but if you actually exerted some large external energy immediately, like you knocking over the first domino, all that stored energy will start going down the domino path.
It takes a lot for radioactive material to suddenly become supercritical and explode. Stars are.. kind of this. Fuison fuel collects and compresses under the force of it’s own gravity until a sustained fusion reaction pushes it back outward, lowering the pressure and slowing the reaction.
In big rocks made out of old left over stars (planets) the heavy fissionable elements forged in nova like uranium is pretty rare, and spread relatively thinly. For an explosion they’d have to be concentrated a lot. U-235 could form a ‘natural bomb’ if it was compressed together, but before it exploded the heat of it reacting would disperse it and push it apart. U-235 only makes up 0.7% of uranium normally found on earth though, and it’s really, really* hard to separate from U-238, an isotope of uranium that won’t make a bomb no matter how much you put in one place.
*It’s very, very easy to make a nuclear bomb if you have lots of U-235, and natural uranium isn’t very hard to get. The reason nuclear bombs are rare is the difficulty in separating it from U-238.
The sun is a giant fusion reactor that weighs 330,000 times planet earth. A fission reaction inside a distant star probably wouldn’t even be detectable.
Natural oar is stable because it hasn’t been enriched. Also enriched uranium or plutonium don’t just get set off. You have to start the chain reaction and it is very difficult.
You couldn’t set it off by lighting it in fire or throwing it in the ground. It takes a lot.
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