Making a Spec of Dust Jump

Did you know in a Hiroshima sized atom bomb explosion where a fraction of the fissile material(that which can sustain a chain reaction) gets used up, there are about:

2^80 fission generations (doublings)

1.2e24 actual fissions

Or, 1.2 trillion trillion fissions

Or, 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 fissions

Or, about 300Tj (trillion joules of energy)

Or, 300 trillion watts all released in one second

Or, about the energy generated by 300,000 of the latest nuclear power stations running at full tilt in one second

Actually, the totality of all fission generations and the actual release of the total energy is over within a few microseconds. It takes about a nanosecond for a fission to release a neutron and a bit longer for each neutron to hit the next nucleus. So let's say 80 times several tens of nanoseconds.

The heat and blast we see are the effects of that golf ball sized piece of metal, having already converted a fraction of its mass to energy over the next few whole seconds.

Each single fission has the energy to make a spec of dust jump, or swing a mosquito wing just once.

To put this into every day context, that much energy could make a mass of rock, weighing one hundred thousand tonnes, move. Or, a block of stone about 300 meters on each side. Or a 4000ft tall mountain.

The largest bomb detonations have been several times larger than this and are not necessarily limited.

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