For more than 100 years, nuclear transformations have driven key advances in chemistry, such as discovering new elements, producing high levels of radioactivity, and enabling applications in biology, geology, and medicine. In 1934, Szilard and Chalmers used thermal‐ neutron irradiation of ethyl iodide (C₂H₅I) to produce large activities of free ¹²⁸I-, showing that prompt gamma-ray de-excitation of the excited nucleus can impart recoil energies greater than the C–I bond energy and thus break the bond to release radioiodine. However, ethyl iodide’s (radio-)chemical instability complicates quantitative retention studies. To circumvent these challenges, we studied the metal-organic compound tris(2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-3,5-heptandionato)chromium(III), or abbreviated Cr(tmhd)3. We employed this compound because it meets the requirements for our technical application, and it has been precisely studied regarding the retention, or the percentage of molecules that can be found in the original chemical form after thermal neutron capture. Despite recoil energies from gamma de-excitation far exceeding the ~2–3 eV Cr–O bond strength, the experimentally observed retention of intact 51Cr(tmhd)₃ after thermal neutron capture yields 7–8 % [2]. Despite the low survival fraction, a fundamental question arises: why does the molecular disintegration not approach unity when recoil energies vastly outperform bond dissociation thresholds? Our starting point is the fundamental energy and momentum conservation for the nucleus when emitting a gamma ray, as this is widely used in the literature to calculate retention. Nuclear data from the IAEA provided transitions between energy levels and gamma energies to calculate the recoils. In a simplified Monte Carlo approach, the calculated retention amounts to 6.8%. A more sophisticated approach considering angular correlations and branching ratios, the probability for a specific excited nuclear state, was used, but the results of the previous calculations of retention could not be reproduced. Future work will refine this framework by integrating nuclear and chemical properties to develop a more comprehensive and accurate model of retention calculations. [1] Szilard L, Chalmers T A 1934 Nature 134 462 [2] Pichler V et al 2022 J Radioanal Nucl Chem 331 5067-5079