Nuclear energies

If you know much about nuclear decays, you know that they're so much more energetic than ordinary chemical reactions that you can neglect the latter. The energy released by the decay of a uranium 238 atom is the same as that released by the decay of U-238 chloride, to within measurement errors. The energy ratios are a million to 1, or a hundred thousand to 1. The chemical bonds don't matter enough to bother with.

Unless they do. "Thorium 229, which has an isomeric state Thorium 229m, which can be obtained as a decay product of Uranium 233. The transition energy of this state is 8.28 +- 0.17 eV" That's electronVolts, and that's easily within range of chemical energies. In fact even the crystal structure matters for predicting the exact energy release.

I'd never heard of such low nuclear energies before.