PJ Vogt

When he smashed neutrons into uranium, he'd ended up with another metal, barium, that's much smaller than uranium.

Scientists already knew at the time that uranium was unstable.

What Meitner and Frisch worked out on their walk in the snow was that you could actually split a uranium atom in two, and that when you did, it would release energy, lots of energy.

Meitner and Frisch scratched out these first calculations together out there in the snow.

It was 1938.

This is writer Rebecca Tuhus Dubrow.

She wrote a book about all this, including the strangeness of how nuclear power happened to have been discovered at the exact moment when our country was willing to use it as a weapon.

We all know how that story ends.

The atomic bomb.

The U.S.

killing hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But after the war, there's this push in America to use nuclear for something besides a weapon of war.

This old TV episode viewers would have watched on their sets in 1957 was during the wave of real excitement about our nuclear future.

In the clip, Walt Disney himself appears to explain how we're on the precipice of something wonderful, an atomic age, then hands off to a German scientist holding a storybook, here to tell us in Disney terms about what's going to happen next.

That's crazy to imagine like Disney selling nuclear power.

It's just so weird that they ended up as part of the propaganda of this.

Looking back at the numbers from our era of peak nuclear optimism, roughly the 1960s to the mid-70s, it's just a very different America.

The federal government built the first commercial nuclear power plant in the U.S.

in 1957 in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

But in the 60s, private investment begins to pour in.