system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Would it be any dangerous at all to split even one atom?

How many atoms would you have to split to for example take out everyone in a 1 meter radius?

I remember a SciShow video that said something along the lines of splitting the atoms in a log would would take out a whole city, but there's billions of atoms in one.

Edit: I'm aware that it's gonna be hard to calculate exactly, but is there an estimate?
gpt
Here are some rough numbers to give you a feeling for the energy scales that are involved in nuclear reactions:

**1\. The decay of one atom of uranium-235 releases about 200MeV or about 3\*10^(-11)J.**

For one atom, this is a huge amount of energy, about a million times more than the energy of a photon of visible light. Nevertheless, while this more than enough energy to rip apart chemical bonds in your body, it's far from enough to create much of a bang on a macroscopic scale. To see why, let's compare this energy to something we know for sure can rattle things around, such as a nicely sized ball of TNT:

**2\. The explosion of 1kg of TNT releases 4MJ (4\*10^(6)J).** 

In other words, you would need to split ~1\*10^17 atoms of U-235 to get as much energy as you could get from blowing up 1kg of TNT. However the comparison becomes much more favorable for uranium when you make the switch form atoms to mass. When you consider that each atom of U-235 only has an atomic mass of ca. 235amu, you see that: 

**3. The fission of ~5\*10^(-8)kg of U-235 releases as much energy as the explosion of 1kg of TNT**.

This mass, which can be expressed in more convenient units at 50 micrograms, is actually smaller than the mass of one human eyelash! Nuclear energy certainly packs quite a punch...