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I am teaching year 11 Physics for the first time. In a fission reaction mass is converted to energy my students are asking where the mass is taken from - do the nucleons have less mass afterwards?

Diatom
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  • Yes. In fission, the products are more stable and less massive. – joseph h May 08 '23 at 05:43
  • It is probably conceptually less nice to talk about the nucleons. Each entire nuclei will have less energy, due to losing some potential energy. It is better to talk about energy because they have already learnt quite a lot about kinetic and potential energies. Mass is a form of energy, and because it lost some energy, so it would appear to have less rest mass energy. Of course, if you wish to talk about nucleons, you can speak of it as ``binding energy per nucleon", lower or higher depending upon which version you pick. – naturallyInconsistent May 08 '23 at 06:07
  • also this may help https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11449/conversion-of-mass-to-energy-in-chemical-nuclear-reactions – anna v May 08 '23 at 06:09

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