https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation is equally beautiful/awe-inspiring to my eyes. It's like we made those glowing starship engine cores out of science fiction, except they exist in real life. Nuclear detonations feel a bit more like power we can't control - and arguably, that's true.

Indeed. Nuclear detonations are more about just how much power we can deliver to a place on demand, but we don't really control much of it. Nuclear reactors are about us controlling smaller, though still huge amounts of that power.

Related, while I'm at all into cars, I love the ingenuity behind internal combustion engines - we took a substance that just burns very well and figured that if we can explode very small amounts of it in a container very quickly, we can produce lots of reliable, portable power. We built a whole civilization on top of it.

Cherenkov radiation is just beautiful.

>>basically cleverly mixed soil

Very carefully selected soil, where conditions are correct to achieve exponential growth in reactions.

Not all elements are fissile.

I didn't really understand this till recently- so I thought I'd share. Propaganda films from the 50s celebrating the Power of the Atom are a little broad in their claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel

You might appreciate the film Crossroads by the artist Bruce Conner. It's a montage of unmanipulated high-speed film of a nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. The soundtrack is synthesized, partly realistic noises, partly minimalist drone music, one section being by Terry Riley.

Of course it's meant to be troubling. Conner was inspired (according to http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/library/WMConnerFallout.... ) by this book: "Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads" (Available here: https://archive.org/details/bombsatbikinioff00unit )

Here's a recent review of the film: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/15/bruce-c...

And an evocative, kind of Lovecraftian, extract from the official report:

"Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena. By studying slow-motion films...the scientists eventually pieced together the full story. Without question one reason why observers had so much trouble in retaining a clear impression of the explosion phenomena was the lack of appropriate words and concepts. The explosion phenomena abounded in absolutely unprecedented inventions in solid geometry. No adequate vocabulary existed for these novelies. The vocabulary bottleneck continued for months even among scientific groups. Finally after two months of verbal groping, a conference was held and over thirty special terms, with carefully drawn definitions, were agreed upon. Among these terms were the following: dome, fillet, side jets, bright tracks, cauliflower cloud, fallout, air shock disc, water shock disc, base surge, water mound, uprush, aftercloud."

I am generally against nuclear weapons but to be honest if I got an offer to watch a nuclear explosion live I would go without question.

When I went to SFMOMA a number of months back, they showed Bruce Conner's Crossroads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossroads_(1976_film)).

It was truly mesmerizing, even in black and white. Granted, the purpose was to cinematize the event, but even in a small room it felt humbling.

You can be opposed to the use of nuclear weapons but still be academically interested and curious in them. Regardless of what you think of them I think we can all agree they are impressive and awesome (not in the colloquial use of the word).