Nuclear power

Nuclear power didn't emerge from a single breakthrough—it required the convergence of three distinct technological lineages, a discovery that defied intuition, and a war that forced the impossible into existence within three years.

The foundation was laid in the 1880s when Charles Parsons invented the modern steam turbine, solving the problem of extracting thermal energy in controlled incremental steps. His first megawatt turbine went online in 1899 at Elberfeld, establishing the architecture that would later convert reactor heat into electricity. Nuclear power plants don't generate electricity directly; they're elaborate steam engines. Without Parsons' 50-year refinement of turbine technology, the thermal energy locked in uranium atoms would have remained unusable.

The discovery pathway to fission was itself contingent. In December 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann bombarded uranium with slow neutrons and found barium. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, during a walk through a snowy Swedish forest, calculated that uranium atoms were splitting—coining the term "fission" from biology. Within weeks, physicists worldwide recognized that fission released additional neutrons, making chain reactions theoretically possible.

Theory became hardware because of Manhattan Project urgency. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled chain reaction in Chicago Pile-1, built under Stagg Field. The transition from weapon to power occurred in parallel across three nations: the Soviet Union's Obninsk plant connected to the grid June 27, 1954; Britain's Calder Hall opened October 1956; the U.S. Shippingport achieved criticality December 2, 1957. Westinghouse and General Electric established competing reactor architectures that still dominate today, both emerging from naval propulsion programs.