Will Eating Uranium Make You Fat? - The Virtual Room (VRSS)

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I have seen this image below many times recently. Which brought me to think, is this even true?

One gram of Uranium does actually contain 20 billion calories, but not to get confused, let me clear something to you.

First, there’s two energy units called calories, the regular one and the dietary one (the one on your food labels) (where one dietary calorie = 1000 calories or 1 kilocalorie).

Second, the only way to a huge number of calories such as that from each gram of Uranium is in a case of a nuclear fusion chain reaction.

Uranium undergoes alpha decay with an energy of 4.267 MeV, so if we let a gram of uranium-238 undergo alpha decay, it will produce 1.73 gigajoules or 413 million calories (413,000 kilocalories), notice this is much less than 20 billion calories. Even Uranium-235 alpha decay has an energy of 4.679 MeV so it won’t get you much closer to that 20 billion. Besides this, both isotopes have very long half-lives, so the energy release is naturally very slow.

Even with that amount of energy in it, that does not mean you wll gain 59kg (413000kcal×2/3500kcal/kg) [I have used the method we have seen before in a previous article] from eating 1 gram of Uranium (I guess that’s clear from how absurd it looks). As the human body can not use nuclear energy in its metabolic system.

In case you were afraid of gaining weight from eating Uranium, you may stop worrying I guess. But the question that matters now however:

Could we eat Uranium?

Click on link below to know more!

https://vrss.home.blog/2020/02/19/could-we-eat-uranium/

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