Nuclear Power Trivia
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60 free Nuclear Power trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nuclear power trivia covers the whole story of the peaceful atom, from a squash court under a Chicago football stadium to the fusion tokamak rising in southern France. This quiz starts with the basics: what fissions, how much of the world's electricity comes from reactors, which country leans on nuclear hardest and which has the biggest fleet. Then it walks through the firsts: Chicago Pile-1 in 1942, the four light bulbs at EBR-I, Obninsk feeding a grid in 1954, Calder Hall, the submarine Nautilus under the North Pole and Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace. The middle of the quiz is the accidents that shaped public opinion. Chernobyl gets several questions (the RBMK design, xenon poisoning, Pripyat, the Swedish alarm, the sarcophagus and Slavutych), as do Three Mile Island (the stuck valve, the Kemeny Commission, the Microsoft restart) and Fukushima (TEPCO, the 13-metre wave, three meltdowns). Kyshtym, Windscale and SL-1 are here for the experts. The last section covers fuel and records: yellowcake, enrichment levels, thorium, Kazakhstan's uranium, Finland's Onkalo repository, the desert plant cooled by sewage, the largest stations on Earth and what ITER means in Latin. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on nuclear power, the individual plants and the accidents, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. Easy questions suit any curious player; the expert tier reaches Wyhl, Phénix and boron in graphite.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which low-carbon source generated more of the world's electricity than nuclear power in 2023?
Hydropower
Hydropower: it beat nuclear even though droughts in India and Mexico cut its output that year.
Q 02As of 2024, which country generated the highest share of its electricity from nuclear power?
France
France: in 1974 its government decided to expand nuclear power rapidly.
Q 03Which reactor maker filed for bankruptcy in 2017 after cost overruns on new reactors in Georgia and South Carolina?
Westinghouse
Westinghouse: soon afterwards, the South Carolina project was abandoned with its two new reactors unfinished.
Q 04Which country's dismantled nuclear warheads supplied fuel for up to 10% of US electricity for two decades?
Russia
Russia: the flood of cheap fuel held down uranium prices and discouraged new Western investment for years.
Q 05Which radioisotope-powered NASA probe is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune?
Voyager 2
Voyager 2: as its nuclear generators weaken, NASA has been switching off instruments to keep it running.
Q 06What was the first artificial nuclear reactor, which went critical on 2 December 1942?
Chicago Pile-1
Chicago Pile-1: while the team watched from a balcony, George Weil, alone on the floor, methodically pulled out its cadmium control rods.
Q 07Which physicist led the experiment that produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942?
Enrico Fermi
He had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and emigrated to America shortly afterwards.
Q 08The world's first artificial nuclear reactor was built under the stands of which university football field?
Stagg Field
Stagg Field: in early 1943 the reactor was taken apart and rebuilt, with concrete shielding, in the Argonne Forest outside the city.
Q 09Which drink, served in paper cups, did Eugene Wigner open to celebrate the first controlled nuclear chain reaction?
Chianti
Chianti: afterwards, many of those present signed the straw wrapping on the bottle.
Q 10Which Hungarian scientist conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933?
Leo Szilard
Leo Szilard: in 1939 he drafted the letter Albert Einstein signed urging President Roosevelt to back fission research.
Q 11Which impurity is thought to have spoiled Walther Bothe's wartime test of graphite as a reactor moderator?
Boron
Boron: the flawed result, probably caused by boron in the samples, left the Nazi bomb project relying on scarce heavy water instead.
Q 12Which Idaho town was briefly powered entirely by a nearby nuclear reactor in 1955?
Arco
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.
Q 13What type of reactor made some of the first nuclear electricity in Idaho in 1951?
Breeder
Breeder: electricity wasn't its purpose; it was built to show that a reactor could make more fuel than it used.
Q 21During the 1980s, how often on average did a new nuclear reactor start up somewhere in the world?
Every 17 days
Every 17 days: yet the boom was already fading, and more than 100 US reactor orders were cancelled in the 1970s and 1980s.
Q 22Which country voted against nuclear power in a 1987 referendum and had shut all its plants by 1990?
Italy
Italy: when a later government planned a nuclear comeback, voters rejected it again in a June 2011 referendum.
Q 23After the 2011 Fukushima accident, which country approved plans to close all of its reactors by 2022?
Germany
Germany: when gas supplies ran short in 2022, its last three reactors were kept running until April 2023 before they too shut.
Q 14Which US president delivered the 'Atoms for Peace' speech at the United Nations?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower: his program opened nuclear research to civilians and redirected US effort toward generating electricity.
Q 15Which plant became the world's first nuclear power station to feed electricity to a grid, in June 1954?
Obninsk, USSR
Obninsk, USSR: its reactor gave only about 5 MW, yet its graphite-and-water design was scaled up for far larger Soviet reactors.
Q 16Which Soviet icebreaker, launched in 1957, was the world's first nuclear-powered surface ship?
Lenin
Lenin: nuclear fuel let it clear ice along the Arctic coast for long seasons without regular refuelling.
Q 17Who officially opened Britain's first nuclear power station in October 1956?
Queen Elizabeth II
Queen Elizabeth II: she spoke in the shadow of the plant next door, which had made material for Britain's first atomic bomb.
Q 18What was the name of the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, launched in 1954?
USS Nautilus
USS Nautilus: on her first run under nuclear power, in January 1955, her crew signalled a now-famous message: 'Underway on nuclear power.'
Q 19What feat did the first nuclear submarine accomplish on 3 August 1958?
A submerged crossing of the North Pole
A submerged crossing of the North Pole: the White House ordered the under-ice voyage as an answer to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
Q 20Which 1970s event drove many countries to invest heavily in nuclear power?
The 1973 oil crisis
The 1973 oil crisis: an embargo and production cuts by oil exporters roughly quadrupled the price of oil.
Q 24Which type of Soviet-designed reactor was involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?
RBMK
The RBMK design's positive void coefficient meant that steam bubbles in the coolant increased reactivity instead of damping it.
Q 25Which city near the Chernobyl plant was abandoned after the 1986 explosion?
Pripyat
Pripyat: its residents weren't evacuated until the day after the explosion.
Q 26Radiation detected in which country on 28 April 1986 forced the USSR to publicly acknowledge Chernobyl?
Sweden
Sweden: radiation alarms went off at its Forsmark nuclear plant, but checks showed the radiation had come from elsewhere.
Q 27Which neutron-absorbing fission by-product built up in the Chernobyl reactor as power was reduced?
Xenon-135
Xenon-135: to fight the falling power, operators pulled out too many control rods, leaving the reactor dangerously hard to control.
Q 28Which purpose-built city replaced the abandoned town beside the Chernobyl plant?
Slavutych
Slavutych: many of its residents commute into the exclusion zone to work at the Chernobyl site.
Q 29What structure was hastily built around the wrecked Chernobyl reactor 4 in 1986?
The sarcophagus
The sarcophagus: in November 2016 a far larger arch, the New Safe Confinement, was slid over it so the wreckage could be dismantled.
Q 30Which international nuclear safety body was founded in 1989 in response to Chernobyl?
World Association of Nuclear Operators
World Association of Nuclear Operators: its members' plants get in-depth peer reviews by independent teams from outside their own organisations.