Nuclear energy undoubtedly revolutionised the history of the 20th century, redrawing geopolitical balances and promoting an extraordinary scientific revolution in the energy and military sectors. It all began in 1938, when the two German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated how the uranium atom could be split by releasing an enormous amount of energy.
This discovery came just before the outbreak of World War II, a dramatic moment in human history. In the 1940s, the Manhattan Project, led by the famous scientist Arthur Openheimer, turned this discovery into a fearsome weapon: the atomic bomb. Thanks to this innovation, the United States ended the war in the Pacific, crushing the morale of Japanese forces with a devastating show of force and incinerating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The devastation led to new thoughts that these weapons should no longer be used. Thus began the race for civil nuclear energy and, in 1954, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to inaugurate a nuclear power plant in Obninsk, followed later by the United States and European countries. Nuclear power promised an infinite and relatively cheap energy resource that could reduce the now saturated dependence on fossil fuels. Nuclear energy proved to be a pillar for economic growth and improved quality of life for populations.
Today, the world's largest nuclear power producers are the United States with 95 active reactors, France with 57, China with 47, Russia with 38, and Japan with 33.
One day, the fission technique will be replaced by fusion and, at the moment, many studies are active in the area of increasing the performance of nuclear energy. Unlike fission, which produces a large amount of waste, fusion aims to combine two light nuclei to generate a large amount of energy without the problem of waste.
Despite the current challenges, nuclear energy still remains the only credible alternative to fossil fuels.