First law of Thermodynamics

In my Engineering days, I religiously studied (and probably forgot to understand:-) the first law of Thermodynamics - "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the sum total of the energy in an isolated system remains constant". What a memory! Call it the power of mug-up

Then it was not too much in the past, that I started wondering if the law would be true, how the hell can we produce enormous amount of nuclear energy with so little input power? Is this an issue of a lot of benefit with negligible cost? My deeper sence of consciousness yelled at me to figue out how this works. A bit of scratching my head resulted in the below:

All bogs down to the law of gravity. The law of gravitation is that every body attracts another in a manner directly proportional to their mass and inversly proportional to the square of the distance between them. Naturaly, the gravitational force between the consitutents of an atom is enormously large because of the distance between them is infinitely small. So in case, the Nucleus is split (which is in fact the case in nuclear power generation), the amount if energy that has to get released has to be obviously huge:-

And the 2nd point is that the first law of Thermodynamic also takes into consideration of the system attributes - - It says that the energy is constant in an isolated system. And our case has 2 independent isolated systems - so problem solved!

By the way, when I think about the law of gravitation, it was only after a couple of years of my school days that I got to realise the exact law. Until then I was wondering that if I were to stand at one of the Poles of our planet and drop a ball, the ball would be gone for ever in space (because, its opposite to what I do when I am away from the poles - to throw a ball upwards and it comes down) and it was hard for me to believe and to imagine too -
But then I came to know that the force acts towards the center of the Earth and in fact even in Poles, I can only throw it upwards:-!


Gulmohar.