Question

Which statement is false?

a. Fusion involves the combination of two smaller atoms into a larger atom.
b. Fission involves the splitting of an atom into smaller atoms.
c. Fission and fusion are two processes that release very little amounts of energy. Rewrite it so it is true?

Answer 1

The last one is false
This is it rewritten: fission and fusion are two processes that release vast amount of energy

Answer 2

The false statement is:
C) Fission and fusion are two processes that release very little amounts of energy.
We can rewrite it so it is true, as follows:
Fission and fusion are two processes that release very large amounts of energy. We can see this by looking at the famous Einstein's equivalence between mass and energy. In fact, during these two processes, part of the mass of the initial products is converted into energy, according to

`E=mc^2`
where m is the mass converted into energy in the process, E is the amount of energy released, and c is the speed of light. We see that the factor
`c^2` is a huge number (
`c=3\cdot 10^8 m/s`, so
`c^2` is of order
`10^(16)`), therefore even if only a very small mass is converted in these two processes, the amount of energy released is huge.