Maybe it is impossible to break an iron nucleus but let pressume we have 10 inert iron atoms and somehow fission them in lighter elements. Will the electrostatic force cause to accelerate these lighter elements so they gain kinetic energy and become very fast so causing an explosion?
1 Answers
Iron has the greatest binding energy per nucleon, not the least.
pressume we have 10 inert iron atoms and somehow fission them in lighter elements.
As the products of this process will have less binding energy, this process requires energy input. You will have to power this fission process.
Will the electrostatic force cause to accelerate these lighter elements so they gain kinetic energy
Possibly, but that depends entirely on the specifics of the process. Any such kinetic energy will come from the excess of whatever is driving the fission in the first place.
Any explosion or KE will be less than the energy input.
It's like trying to get a hot fire by burning ash and carbon dioxide. You can do it, but only by starting with an even hotter fire.
still cannot figure out why binding energy is the only that matters in fission rather than proton to proton repealing force. If there is a mass defect this still doesn't mean that this imaginary iron fission does not produce high speed nuclei even they are slightly less massive than the iron core.
You get energy when you move something from a high potential energy state to a low potential energy state. Like moving wood to ash in a chemical reaction. Or moving a cart at the top of a hill to the bottom.
If someone asks if my tennis ball can do damage because it can bump a wagon, causing it to roll downhihil and destroy a house, I might need to understand the situation carefully to see if this could happen. It's certainly plausible because the cart has gravitational potential energy that it can access by rolling down the hill. Similarly, if someone asks if a lit cigarette could cause problems because there is a lot of gasoline in an environment with oxygen, it's entirely plausible that it could set off a reaction that releases a lot of chemical potential energy.
If someone asks if my tennis ball could bump the same wagon, causing it to go from the bottom of a mountain to the top, damaging the house up there, I don't have to worry. I know that the only way to get the wagon from the bottom to the top is with a lot of energy. If my tennis ball could do that, it could just hit the house itself.
Similarly, we know that iron is "at the bottom" of the energy valley. The only way to make something go from iron to another element, is to input energy. The mechanism is irrelevant and doesn't need to be considered. If you want to break apart iron in a way that releases energy, it is possible but it requires even more energy as input to accomplish.
The binding energy here is the measure we use to tell how high or low we are compared to other elements.
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