60 Fun Facts About Nuclear Power

Which low-carbon source generated more of the world's electricity than nuclear power in 2023?

Hydropower: it beat nuclear even though droughts in India and Mexico cut its output that year.

As of 2024, which country generated the highest share of its electricity from nuclear power?

France: in 1974 its government decided to expand nuclear power rapidly.

Which reactor maker filed for bankruptcy in 2017 after cost overruns on new reactors in Georgia and South Carolina?

Westinghouse: soon afterwards, the South Carolina project was abandoned with its two new reactors unfinished.

Which country's dismantled nuclear warheads supplied fuel for up to 10% of US electricity for two decades?

Russia: the flood of cheap fuel held down uranium prices and discouraged new Western investment for years.

Which radioisotope-powered NASA probe is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune?

Voyager 2: as its nuclear generators weaken, NASA has been switching off instruments to keep it running.

What was the first artificial nuclear reactor, which went critical on 2 December 1942?

Chicago Pile-1: while the team watched from a balcony, George Weil, alone on the floor, methodically pulled out its cadmium control rods.

Which physicist led the experiment that produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942?

He had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and emigrated to America shortly afterwards.

The world's first artificial nuclear reactor was built under the stands of which university football field?

Stagg Field: in early 1943 the reactor was taken apart and rebuilt, with concrete shielding, in the Argonne Forest outside the city.

Which drink, served in paper cups, did Eugene Wigner open to celebrate the first controlled nuclear chain reaction?

Chianti: afterwards, many of those present signed the straw wrapping on the bottle.

Which Hungarian scientist conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933?

Leo Szilard: in 1939 he drafted the letter Albert Einstein signed urging President Roosevelt to back fission research.

Which impurity is thought to have spoiled Walther Bothe's wartime test of graphite as a reactor moderator?

Boron: the flawed result, probably caused by boron in the samples, left the Nazi bomb project relying on scarce heavy water instead.

Which Idaho town was briefly powered entirely by a nearby nuclear reactor in 1955?

Arco: its power came from BORAX-III, one of a line of test reactors whose first model was deliberately destroyed in a 1954 safety test.

What type of reactor made some of the first nuclear electricity in Idaho in 1951?

Breeder: electricity wasn't its purpose; it was built to show that a reactor could make more fuel than it used.

Which US president delivered the 'Atoms for Peace' speech at the United Nations?

Dwight Eisenhower: his program opened nuclear research to civilians and redirected US effort toward generating electricity.

Which plant became the world's first nuclear power station to feed electricity to a grid, in June 1954?

Obninsk, USSR: its reactor gave only about 5 MW, yet its graphite-and-water design was scaled up for far larger Soviet reactors.

Which Soviet icebreaker, launched in 1957, was the world's first nuclear-powered surface ship?

Lenin: nuclear fuel let it clear ice along the Arctic coast for long seasons without regular refuelling.

Who officially opened Britain's first nuclear power station in October 1956?

Queen Elizabeth II: she spoke in the shadow of the plant next door, which had made material for Britain's first atomic bomb.

What was the name of the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954?

USS Nautilus: on her first run under nuclear power, in January 1955, her crew signalled a now-famous message: 'Underway on nuclear power.'

What feat did the first nuclear submarine accomplish on 3 August 1958?

A submerged crossing of the North Pole: the White House ordered the under-ice voyage as an answer to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.

Which 1970s event drove many countries to invest heavily in nuclear power?

The 1973 oil crisis: an embargo and production cuts by oil exporters roughly quadrupled the price of oil.

During the 1980s, how often on average did a new nuclear reactor start up somewhere in the world?

Every 17 days: yet the boom was already fading, and more than 100 US reactor orders were cancelled in the 1970s and 1980s.

Which country voted against nuclear power in a 1987 referendum and had shut all its plants by 1990?

Italy: when a later government planned a nuclear comeback, voters rejected it again in a June 2011 referendum.

After the 2011 Fukushima accident, which country approved plans to close all of its reactors by 2022?

Germany: when gas supplies ran short in 2022, its last three reactors were kept running until April 2023 before they too shut.

Which type of Soviet-designed reactor was involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?

The RBMK design's positive void coefficient meant that steam bubbles in the coolant increased reactivity instead of damping it.

Which city near the Chernobyl plant was abandoned after the 1986 explosion?

Pripyat: its residents weren't evacuated until the day after the explosion.

Radiation detected in which country on 28 April 1986 forced the USSR to publicly acknowledge Chernobyl?

Sweden: radiation alarms went off at its Forsmark nuclear plant, but checks showed the radiation had come from elsewhere.

Which neutron-absorbing fission by-product built up in the Chernobyl reactor as power was reduced?

Xenon-135: to fight the falling power, operators pulled out too many control rods, leaving the reactor dangerously hard to control.

Which purpose-built city replaced the abandoned town beside the Chernobyl plant?

Slavutych: many of its residents commute into the exclusion zone to work at the Chernobyl site.

What structure was hastily built around the wrecked Chernobyl reactor 4 in 1986?

The sarcophagus: in November 2016 a far larger arch, the New Safe Confinement, was slid over it so the wreckage could be dismantled.

Which international nuclear safety body was founded in 1989 in response to Chernobyl?

World Association of Nuclear Operators: its members' plants get in-depth peer reviews by independent teams from outside their own organisations.

The Three Mile Island plant sits on which river near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania?

Susquehanna: after the accident, the damaged reactor's contaminated water was cleaned up and eventually evaporated.

What component stuck open at Three Mile Island in 1979, letting coolant escape from the primary loop?

A pilot-operated relief valve: a control-room light showed only that the close signal had been sent, so operators believed it had shut.

Which film about a reactor accident opened just before Three Mile Island?

The China Syndrome: just before the real accident, the nuclear industry had called the film a 'character assassination of an entire industry'.

Three Mile Island inquiry chair John Kemeny, co-inventor of BASIC, was president of which college?

Dartmouth: his commission found the operators had followed inadequate procedures in a control room poorly built for handling an accident.

Which company struck a deal to have Three Mile Island Unit 1 restarted to power its data centers?

Microsoft: Unit 1 had been shut in 2019 for economic reasons, before data centres' demand for power made it worth reviving.

Which utility owned and operated the Fukushima Daiichi plant at the time of the 2011 accident?

Tokyo Electric Power Company: three of its former executives were later tried for negligence over the disaster, and acquitted in 2019.

What did Fukushima Daiichi's crews pump into the overheating reactors as a last resort in March 2011?

Seawater: when told to halt the pumping, the plant's managers quietly kept it going, and the order was soon withdrawn.

Which Fukushima Daiichi reactors were operating when the Tōhoku earthquake struck on 11 March 2011?

Numbers 1, 2 and 3: yet Unit 4, with no fuel in its reactor, had the top of its building blown off, probably by hydrogen from Unit 3.

Which Japanese prime minister was in office when the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident began?

Naoto Kan: four months after the accident began, he said Japan had no choice but to reduce its reliance on nuclear power.

Which future US president, then a Navy officer, helped clean up after the 1952 Chalk River reactor accident?

Jimmy Carter: as president in 1979 he inspected Three Mile Island in person and set up the commission that investigated the accident.

The 1957 Kyshtym disaster took place at which secret Soviet nuclear plant?

Mayak: the plant wasn't shown on Soviet maps, so the disaster was named after Kyshtym, the nearest known town.

What was destroyed for about a month across 500 km² of countryside after the 1957 Windscale fire?

Milk: the authorities banned sales from local farms, fearing the milk carried iodine-131 released by the fire.

The SL-1 reactor, whose 1961 explosion killed its three operators, was run by which service?

US Army: SL-1 was a prototype for small reactors meant to power remote military sites, such as radar stations near the Arctic.

Which uranium compound, made from yellowcake, is spun as a gas in centrifuges to enrich uranium?

Uranium hexafluoride: after enrichment it is turned into uranium dioxide, which is pressed into fuel pellets.

Roughly what fraction of natural uranium is the fissile isotope uranium-235?

About 0.7%: nearly all the rest is uranium-238, which is why most reactors need their fuel enriched first.

Which three countries were the top uranium producers in 2022, with 69% of world output?

Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia: Kazakhstan, the top producer since 2009, gets almost all its uranium by dissolving the ore underground instead of digging it out.

Which element, about three times as abundant as uranium, is central to the third stage of India's nuclear programme?

Thorium: India has one of the world's largest thorium reserves but little uranium, so its plan builds toward using thorium.

Which country built Onkalo, the world's first deep repository for spent nuclear fuel?

Finland: a 1994 law ruled that all of Finland's nuclear waste must be dealt with inside the country, so it dug its own repository.

Which desert nuclear plant is cooled with treated sewage from nearby cities?

Palo Verde, Arizona: in 2010, five Phoenix-area cities struck a 40-year deal to sell it their wastewater, raising money for the cities.

Which US laboratory's lasers achieved fusion ignition in December 2022?

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: the same lasers support US efforts to keep nuclear weapons reliable without explosive tests.

As of 2025, which country is home to Europe's largest nuclear power plant?

Ukraine: the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant has been occupied since March 2022, with all its reactors shut down.

Barakah, the first nuclear power station on the Arabian Peninsula, is in which country?

United Arab Emirates: in 2009 it picked a South Korean group led by KEPCO to build the plant's four reactors.

The name of ITER, the giant fusion experiment at Cadarache, also means what in Latin?

The way: the idea took shape when Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan discussed a shared fusion effort at the 1985 Geneva summit.

Which element, recovered by reprocessing spent fuel, is blended with uranium to make MOX fuel?

Plutonium: the US planned a South Carolina plant to turn surplus weapons plutonium into MOX, then cancelled it in 2018.

Which US Navy aircraft carrier was driven by eight nuclear reactors, where later carriers made do with two?

USS Enterprise: in 1964 it and two nuclear-powered escort ships sailed around the world without refuelling.

Which fast reactor, connected to the grid in the 1970s, was shut down in 2009?

Phénix: it outlasted its giant successor, Superphénix, which was closed in the late 1990s after running very little.

Which admiral is known as the father of the nuclear Navy?

Hyman Rickover: he personally interviewed all candidates for the nuclear program, some of them on chairs with shortened front legs.

Counting accidents and air pollution, which energy source causes the most deaths per unit of electricity?

Coal: smoke from burning it was behind London's Great Smog of 1952, which killed thousands of people.

Roughly how much uranium is dissolved in the world's oceans?

Billions of tonnes: far more than known land deposits, but at about 3 parts per billion it costs too much to extract at present prices.

Which Georgia nuclear plant added two new reactors that joined the grid in 2023 and 2024?

Vogtle: delays pushed both new units more than a year past the start dates planned in 2020.