alpine_jim

Fabrice Bellard is ten Ronalds.

i believe there was some early speculation that the unprecedented temperature of the Trinity test might ignite the atmosphere, somehow making the nitrogen burn, but that would be a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction.

Alpha and beta decay are types of fission.

further, if you only want to look at fissions with similarly-sized daughter products, there are several micrograms of fissile atoms in each of us, so random fissions are indeed constantly happening.

no, there are lots of atoms splitting inside your body every second.

a single U-235 atom’s fission, releasing ~200MeV, (~30 picojoules), in ideal circumstances could maybe nudge a very small fine grain of sand (~ micrograms) enough to see movement (small fraction of a millimetre) under a microscope .

It takes months of refining to make nuclear fuel that’s suitable for sustaining a chain reaction.

it’s an interesting question, I’m glad I did the research checking that the orders of magnitude match!