John, we've by now put hundreds of times more research into nuclear power than we ever did into the atomic bomb. It's a very different challenge, really. The bomb is kind of like, "How can we botch really big?" (Well, no, it's more complicated than that, but it's something like that.)
France is already using fission reactors for most of its electricity. We're not. Our decision is political, not scientific--people in this country are afraid of radiation. But as far as I know, as Kyler has said, no one is using "nuclear energy", and there aren't really a lot of plans to do so.
To clarify that, when we speak of a nuclear power plant we mean fission reactor. A fission reactor takes a large amount of radioactive metal, such as uranium, and packs it together so that the radiation of its decay will make it hot. Control systems, usually removable lead rods, are used to control the rate at which the decay heats the metal, and water or a similar liquid is passed through the hot radioactive metal. To reduce radiation transfer, the liquid passes through one side of a radiator the other side of which has a second reserve of liquid, which is heated by the first.
Now, we're talking really hot--we're talking liquid so hot that it turns to steam when it is so heated, and in doing so becomes highly pressurized. The pressure is released into turbines, which turn generators, which generate electricity. The electricity is what is given to the general public.
So to trace it backwards, we used kinetic energy to make electricity; we used pressure to make kinetic energy; we used heat to make pressure; we used radioactive decay to make heat. So our "nuclear energy" made a lot of heat, which we used to heat water, to create pressure to turn turbines to generate electrical energy.
There's a lot of talk about creating fusion generators, whose advantages are that neither the original product nor the end products are radioactive, and the process itself releases broad EM spectrum radiation but not a lot of dangerous particles, relatively speaking. But no one is talking about making fusion glow globes to light our cities. We're talking about creating controlled fusion reactions to heat water to make pressure to turn turbines to generate electricity.
The only example of direct use of nuclear power that comes to my mind is an episode of (Tom Baker) Doctor Who, in which miners on Pluto were provided with light and heat by means of fusion satellites--fusion reactors which converted hydrogen into helium and in the process released sunlight in quantities sufficient to warm and illumine the planet. That's about as direct a use of nuclear energy as I've found.
And as noted, fission reactors were a necessary step in the development of an atomic bomb, so they were built first. But the controlled use of nuclear energy is a lot more difficult than the uncontrolled release of it.
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All that aside, there's no particular reason why someone couldn't have developed nuclear-based fission reactors to meet energy needs. I think that absent the nuclear arms race, though, early fission systems would have faced the same problems that present solar systems face: they were not cost efficient, and only became cost efficient because we needed to improve breeder reactors to provide the materials for the bombs. You might have to come up with some other impetus--like the oil shortage hit a lot sooner, perhaps if North American and Middle Eastern oil fields were never discovered (or simply didn't exist).
--M. J. Young
