Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Nuclear Power trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Nuclear power trivia covers the whole story of the peaceful atom, from a squash court under a Chicago football stadium to the fusion tokamak rising in southern France. This quiz starts with the basics: what fissions, how much of the world's electricity comes from reactors, which country leans on nuclear hardest and which has the biggest fleet. Then it walks through the firsts: Chicago Pile-1 in 1942, the four light bulbs at EBR-I, Obninsk feeding a grid in 1954, Calder Hall, the submarine Nautilus under the North Pole and Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace. The middle of the quiz is the accidents that shaped public opinion. Chernobyl gets several questions (the RBMK design, xenon poisoning, Pripyat, the Swedish alarm, the sarcophagus and Slavutych), as do Three Mile Island (the stuck valve, the Kemeny Commission, the Microsoft restart) and Fukushima (TEPCO, the 13-metre wave, three meltdowns). Kyshtym, Windscale and SL-1 are here for the experts. The last section covers fuel and records: yellowcake, enrichment levels, thorium, Kazakhstan's uranium, Finland's Onkalo repository, the desert plant cooled by sewage, the largest stations on Earth and what ITER means in Latin. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on nuclear power, the individual plants and the accidents, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. Easy questions suit any curious player; the expert tier reaches Wyhl, Phénix and boron in graphite.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly what share of the world's electricity did nuclear power plants supply in 2023?
About 9%
That made nuclear the second-largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity, and there were 416 civilian reactors running worldwide as of late 2025.
Q 02Which country generates the highest percentage of its electricity from nuclear reactors?
France
France built 25 plants in 15 years after the 1970s energy shocks and hit 71% nuclear electricity by 2019.
Q 03Which country has the largest nuclear reactor fleet and produces the most nuclear electricity?
United States
Its reactors generate almost 800 TWh a year at an average capacity factor of 92%, yet that is only about 19% of the electricity Americans consume.
Q 04To what level of uranium-235 is fuel typically enriched for civilian light water reactors?
3.5–5%
Weapons need far higher enrichment; Shippingport's first core, taken from a cancelled aircraft carrier, used 93% seed fuel.
Q 05Which NASA probe is the textbook example of a spacecraft powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator?
Voyager 2
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators produce only a few kilowatts but keep working for decades where sunlight is too weak for solar panels.
Q 06What was the first artificial nuclear reactor, which went critical on 2 December 1942?
Chicago Pile-1
It was built under the west stands of a football stadium, and Robert Crease called it and its predecessors the largest unbonded masonry structures since the pyramids.
Q 07Which physicist led the experiment that produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in 1942?
Enrico Fermi
He had won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and emigrated to America shortly afterwards.
Q 08The first artificial reactor was assembled under which University of Chicago sports venue?
Stagg Field
The stands were demolished in 1957; the site is now a National Historic Landmark marked by a memorial quadrangle.
Q 09What did the team drink from paper cups to celebrate the first controlled chain reaction?
Chianti
Eugene Wigner had brought the bottle along; the scientists signed its straw wrapper afterwards.
Q 10Which Hungarian scientist first hypothesized the nuclear chain reaction, on 12 September 1933?
Leo Szilard
He later drafted the letter to President Roosevelt that Einstein signed, prompting US government fission research.
Q 11Which graphite impurity had misled German scientists into thinking it was unusable as a moderator?
Boron
The Germans failed to account for boron and cadmium contamination, so their test wrongly rejected graphite.
Q 12Near which Idaho town did EBR-I first generate electricity from a nuclear reactor on 20 December 1951?
Arco
That first run produced only about 100 kW, but the reactor soon powered its own building and the whole town.
Q 13How many 200-watt bulbs did EBR-I light in the first demonstration of nuclear electricity, in December 1951?
Four
EBR-I was also the world's first breeder reactor and ran research until 1964.
Q 21During the 1980s, how often on average did a new nuclear reactor start up somewhere in the world?
Every 17 days
Global installed capacity reached 300 GW by 1990, three times the level of the late 1970s.
Q 22Which major economy voted against nuclear power in a 1987 referendum and phased it out completely by 1990?
Italy
The vote came the year after Chernobyl; Italy still has no operating nuclear stations.
Q 23After the 2011 Fukushima accident, which country approved plans to close all of its reactors by 2022?
Germany
A decade later Germany was restarting coal plants to replace lost Russian gas even as it finished the shutdown.
Q 14Which US president delivered the 'Atoms for Peace' speech at the United Nations in 1953?
Dwight Eisenhower
The speech pushed for rapid development of civilian uses of nuclear power at the height of the Cold War.
Q 15Which plant became the world's first nuclear power station to feed electricity to a grid, in June 1954?
Obninsk, USSR
Its tiny reactor produced only about 5 MW; the plant kept running until 2002 and its technology fed into much larger Soviet reactors.
Q 16What did the letters AM in the name of Obninsk's AM-1 reactor stand for in Russian?
Peaceful Atom
Obninsk sits about 110 km southwest of Moscow and stayed the USSR's only power reactor until the Siberian station opened.
Q 17The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, joined the grid in 1956 in which country?
England
Calder Hall stood at Windscale, the same site that suffered a serious reactor fire the following year.
Q 18What was the name of the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, put to sea in January 1954?
USS Nautilus
In August 1958 she became the first submarine to make a submerged transit of the North Pole; today she is a museum ship in Groton, Connecticut.
Q 19What feat did the first nuclear submarine accomplish on 3 August 1958?
A submerged crossing of the North Pole
Nuclear propulsion let her stay submerged far longer than diesel-electric boats, unlocking routes under the Arctic ice.
Q 20Which 1970s event pushed oil-dependent countries such as Japan to invest heavily in nuclear power?
The 1973 oil crisis
Countries that had burned oil for electricity suddenly had a strong reason to build reactors instead.
Q 24Which type of Soviet-designed reactor was involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster?
RBMK
The RBMK design's positive void coefficient meant that steam bubbles in the coolant increased reactivity instead of damping it.
Q 25What was the name of the city near the Chernobyl plant that was abandoned after the 1986 explosion?
Pripyat
Its residents were not warned during the night of the accident; a 10 km exclusion zone was declared 36 hours later and around 49,000 people were moved out.
Q 26Radiation detected in which country on 28 April 1986 forced the USSR to publicly acknowledge Chernobyl?
Sweden
Alarms went off at the Forsmark nuclear plant, more than 1,000 km from Chernobyl, and workers traced the source elsewhere.
Q 27Which neutron-absorbing fission by-product built up in the Chernobyl reactor as power was reduced?
Xenon-135
The phenomenon is called reactor poisoning; in steady operation the isotope is burned off as fast as it forms.
Q 28Which purpose-built city replaced the abandoned town beside the Chernobyl plant?
Slavutych
It was built across the Dnieper marshes with a direct rail link to the plant.
Q 29What structure was completed in December 1986 to contain the wrecked Chernobyl reactor 4?
The sarcophagus
A far larger arch, the New Safe Confinement, was slid over the old sarcophagus in 2016–2018 to allow the debris to be removed.
Q 30Which international body was created after Chernobyl to promote safety awareness among nuclear plant crews?
World Association of Nuclear Operators
WANO links every commercial operator worldwide; the IAEA, by contrast, dates from 1957.