Origins

As the father of nuclear physics,^[11] Ernest Rutherford is credited with splitting the atom in 1919.^[12] His team in England bombarded nitrogen with naturally occurring alpha particles from radioactive material and observed a proton emitted with energy higher than the alpha particle. In 1932 two of his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working under Rutherford's direction, attempted to split the atomic nucleus by entirely artificial means, using a particle accelerator to bombard lithium with protons, thereby producing two helium nuclei.^[13]

After James Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, nuclear fission was first experimentally achieved by Enrico Fermi in 1934 in Rome, when his team bombarded uranium with neutrons.^[14] In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn^[15] and Fritz Strassmann, along with Austrian physicists Lise Meitner^[16] and Meitner's nephew, Otto Robert Frisch,^[17] conducted experiments with the products of neutron-bombarded uranium. They determined that the relatively tiny neutron split the nucleus of the massive uranium atoms into two roughly equal pieces, which was a surprising result. Numerous scientists, including Leo Szilard who was one of the first, recognized that if fission reactions released additional neutrons, a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction could result. This spurred scientists in many countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union) to petition their governments for support of nuclear fission research.

In the United States, where Fermi and Szilard had both emigrated, this led to the creation of the first man-made reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, which achieved criticality on December 2, 1942. This work became part of the Manhattan Project, which built large reactors at the Hanford Site (formerly the town of Hanford, Washington) to breed plutonium for use in the first nuclear weapons, which were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A parallel uranium enrichment effort also was pursued.

After World War II, the fear that reactor research would encourage the rapid spread of nuclear weapons and technology^[vague], combined with what many scientists^[who?] thought would be a long road of development, created a situation in which the government attempted to keep reactor research under strict government control and classification. In addition, most^[which?] reactor research centered on purely military purposes. There was an immediate^[when?] arms and development race when the United States military^[who?] refused to follow the advice of its own scientific community to form an international cooperative to share information and control nuclear materials^{[citation needed]}. By 2006, things have come full circle with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (see below.)^{[citation needed]}

Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on December 20, 1951, at the EBR-I experimental station near Arco, Idaho, which initially produced about 100 kW (the Arco Reactor was also the first to experience partial meltdown, in 1955). In 1952, a report by the Paley Commission (The President's Materials Policy Commission) for President Harry Truman made a "relatively pessimistic" assessment of nuclear power, and called for "aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy."^[18] A December 1953 speech by President Dwight Eisenhower, "Atoms for Peace," emphasized the useful harnessing of the atom and set the U.S. on a course of strong government support for international use of nuclear power.