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Comment by braingenious | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious. U-238 is not fissionable so ChatGPT just hallucinated that it is and then used Wolfram as a simple calculator.

Whoa man, it’s like, the future dude!

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It's using the energy of radioactive decay, not of a fission chain reaction. Where ChatGPT actually made a mistake was in ignoring the fact you can't get that energy out quickly enough. 1 gram of u-238 will release 19 million Calories of heat over the course of its existence but that will take many billions of years.

It's implied that the uranium sandwich comes with two slices of boron and mayo.

From the screenshot:

“The energy content of uranium-238 can be calculated based on its energy release per fission event. The energy release per fission event of uranium-238 is approximately 200 MeV (million electronvolts”

Nice try, ChatGPT's evil twin. U-238 is fissionable according to this

https://books.google.de/books?id=b5OsewV7smEC&pg=PA473&lpg=P...

"Such reactions produce fast neutrons which cause fission in uranium-238, which is not fissile by slower neutrons below energies of 1MeV."

Nitpick: fast neutrons don't cause fission in uranium-238, they cause it to transmute into uranium-239 [1] which is a much less stable isotope with a half life of less than 30 minutes before it decays into neptunium-239.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_uranium#Uranium-23...

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