A golfball has enough nuclear energy to power every machine on earth for years to come
Lol, I love using the golfball one. A single atom contains enough nuclear energy to kill several several hundred people, correct? A golfball contains probably at least one-hundred quadrillion atoms in it(i'm too lazy to do the math). That's a LOT of nuclear energy.
False. Absolutely, positively, a thousand times false. Where do you get the idea that a single atom contains enough "nuclear energy" to kill hundreds of people? That makes absolutely no sense.
Lixvium's calculations were only slightly off; The molar mass of atoms is measured in grams, not kilograms. So the mass of one hydrogen atom converted to pure energy would be about 1.5e-10 Joules, not 1.5e-7. In other words, 1000 times less. Not that it makes a huge difference, because it's already so small anyway, like Lixvium explained!
Second of all, you seem to have a misunderstanding of what "nuclear energy" is. There are a few things you could be referring to: s
trong nuclear force, which holds the nucleus together. Part of this is binding energy; and the concept of binding energy (and mass defect) is what explains other sources of nuclear energy:
nuclear fusion and nuclear fission.
Let's first look at
fission, which is what we currently use in nuclear reactors. For nuclear fission to take place, you need atoms with HEAVY nuclei, like Uranium-235. Unless it's a uranium golf ball, the golf ball is just not going to have much fissile energy, if any. To cause it to split, you need to add a neutron to the nuclide; this makes it unstable, and causes it to split into two smaller nuclides and also release a lot of energy and a couple of neutrons. These released neutrons then collide with other Uranium-235 nuclides and cause the same thing to happen; as long as you have enough uranium for more neutrons to collide with (the
critical mass) you can keep the chain reaction going. That's how a nuclear reactor works.
Now, a golf ball weighs about 46g, and 1g of Uranium-235 can release
80 million kilojoules of energy; so a golf ball of uranium could produce 3680 million kJ of fissile energy; definitely a ton of energy, but not as much as you're claiming.
Then, there's nuclear fusion, which is how the sun keeps running. For nuclear fusion, you need some light nuclides (like hydrogen), and
very high temperatures. On the order of 100,000,000 degrees C (ie, around 180,000,000 degrees F). And of course, everything at such high temperatures exists as plasma, which is an ionic gaseous phase to put it simply. And it'd be pretty **** hard to make a golf ball out of plasmic pure hydrogen at 180,000,000 degrees F. A normal golf ball simply doesn't have the fusile energy. When two nuclei fuse, they lose some mass, which is converted to pure energy (equal to the "binding energy"... the amount of energy it takes to bind the two atoms together). This is how two hydrogen atoms fuse to form a helium atom.
A hydrogen bomb works by first using a fission reaction to create a super-high temperature for a fraction of a second, enough to set off a fusion reaction. Of course, this energy is not controlled; it's explosive. We don't have the technology to use fusion for our energy needs.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/ImranArif.shtml
http://www.usga.org/aboutus/usga_history/1931_1950.html
http://chemed.chem.purdue.edu/genchem/topicreview/bp/ch23/fission.php
http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power4.htm
Scientists can turn atoms into pure energy, one atom at a time. The problem is it isn't worth the effort, time and money. I said it contains enough energy, not that we were going to harness it. I think you just misinterpreted.
False, false, false! Scientists cannot turn atoms into pure energy. Through thermonuclear and thermodynamic reactions, we can create chemical reactions in which some mass is converted to energy; but we can't turn whole atoms into pure energy.
Seen the new topic about German scientists? It's an interesting read
It is interesting, but it's up to interpretation. The "faster than light" thing is relative; depending on how you interpret it, Einstein's theory was
not broken.
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