The History of Nuclear Power Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

The History of Nuclear Power - Research Paper ExampleAs a global rule, most of these crucial factors actually denote natural phenomena, whether discovered by sheer chance or due to meticulous research, possessing enormous potential for both(prenominal) destruction and creation while others appear a genuinely human invention. Notwithstanding their origin, however, the way these factors suffer been mastered and harnessed to humanitys returns reflects the very human nature to test, to observe, and to dream (US Department of Energy/US DOE/, n.d.). Having played their crucial part in the development of Egypts antediluvian patriarch societies the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms the Nile River annual floods could be considered, beyond any doubt, one of the above-mentioned core phenomena while the institution of slavery in ancient capital of Italy brought about that little-known settlement on the River Tiber to be transformed into the hub of the then world. Without the driving force of s pice trade in medieval times, there might have not come about the Age of Discovery, and neither would the Industrial Revolution without the steam engine. In turn, the commercial drilling for petroleum, which had started at some point in the mid-nineteenth century, not only drove the world into the modernity, but also became the mainspring of present-day geopolitics of the world. The late 1890s, however, witnessed the discovery of a natural phenomenon, which have been given the name radioactivity by Marie and Pierre Curie, and later defined by Ernest Rutherford as a spontaneous event emitting alpha or beta particles from the atomic nuclei, and creating a antithetical element (World Nuclear Association /WNA/, 2010). The consequent exploration of this phenomenon had involved many scientists from different countries across the world from Niels Bohr, Frederick Soddy, James Chadwick, and Enrico Fermi, to Otto Frisch, etc. and produced major breakthroughs, including the discovery of ra dionuclides and neutron, as well as the experimental conformation of Albert Einsteins concept of mass-energy equivalence (WNA, 2010). Exploration of the Atom The sentiment that invisible particles constitute all liaison in the universe is being first developed by ancient Greek philosophers (US DOE, n.d.). The name of those particles atoms comes from one of the meanings of the Greek word (atomos), or indivisible (US DOE, n.d. Liddell and Scott, 1940). This idea reigned supreme at least until the late eighteenth century, but it was not earlier than the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the concept had been revised by scientific experiments (US DOE, n.d.). Following the discovery of Uranium in 1789 by the German chemist Martin Klaproth, who named it after the recently discovered planet Uranus (Herschel and Hoskin, 2003 WNA, 2010), there was a suspension of nearly 100 years during which nothing in this field of science was to get excited about. In November 1895, P rofessor Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen of the Wurzburg University had unintentionally produced a hitherto noncitizen form of radiant energy that was invisible, could cause fluorescence, and passed through objects opaque to light, which he named x-rays (Novelline, 2004) six years later Wilhelm Rontgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of ionizing