@Andris: There are some websites that suggest exactly that. But note that radioactivity itself is an empirically established phenomenon. If you stand next to a big block of enriched Uranium-235, you will die. It is conceivable that the metaphysical idealizations of radioactive processes (such as atom-splitting, neutron-bombardment, etc.) are simply wrong in the right way. That is, neutron-bombardment might be a fanciful description of the microscopic phenomena that, however, happens to have macroscopic correlation with the energy release of radioactive materials.
To put it in simplified terms, nuclear reactors operate on the principle that when you put a bunch of radioactive material in close proximity (fuel rods), the release of energy is increased. I see no necessary reason why the orthodox description of the microscopic phenomena (neutrons breaking apart atoms) is the only conceivable description that is consistent with this behavior, nor do I see that it necessarily follows that if you compress radioactive material into a tiny, spherical ball, that its energy output must rise to the levels that nuclear weapons are supposed to achieve.
Perhaps what radioactive materials are doing is down-converting energy from an extremely high-frequency range - way outside the range we have been able to probe with particle reactors - into a lower frequency range which we observe as the release of radioactive energy (particles). If this is true, then radioactive materials are not “converting matter into energy”, they are simply converting energy from one form (unobservable) to another (observable). In every other field of science, this an ordinary and mundane behavior of the natural world as we understand it (e.g. think of how a radio circuit converts insensible radio-frequency waves to sensible audio waves that our ears can perceive).
Clayton -