Who, when, and how was nuclear energy found?
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In the 20th century.\n\nThe first successful experiment with nuclear fission was in Berlin in 1938. Developing nuclear power was a priority in World War II especially in the US. The first nuclear chain reaction was in 1942 and the atom bomb was developed in 1945.\n\nElectricity was first generated experimentally by nuclear power in 1951. The first large scale nuclear reactor opened in the Soviet Union in 1954 followed by Sellafield in England in 1956. Significant accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 dented confidence in the industry. \n\nFor more information, see the links.
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This might help\n\nhttp://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=how+was+tantalum+discovered&sp=1&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&SpellState=n-3467474897_q-gL5DN60DdgiG3lMcas4afwABAA%40%40&u=www.scescape.net/%7Ewoods/elements/tantalum.html&w=tantalum+discovered&d=PMQ_k0aqMkbj&icp=1&.intl=us
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http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/bomb.html\nhttp://hydrogen.kiwiki.homeip.net/\nhttp://whyfiles.org/186ed_teller/3.html
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Cf: atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. They use the conversion of a tiny amount of mass to lots and lots of energy.
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Nitrogen (Latin nitrum, Greek Nitron meaning "native soda", "genes", "forming") is formally considered to have been discovered by Daniel Rutherford in 1772 (he was not around in 1172, otherwise he may well have discovered it earlier), who called it noxious air or fixed air.\n\nAlfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, pacifist, innovator, armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. He owned Bofors, a major armaments manufacturer, that he had redirected from its previous role as an iron and steel mill. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element Nobelium was named after him.
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In nuclear reactions, MASS is converted into energy.
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Rutherford's Discovery of Alpha Scattering\nI. The French Start First\n\nIn 1900, the Curies and Becquerel were studying radioactivity (Rutherford was in Canada, having just recently moved to McGill University in Montreal. He will return to England, but not for several years.) and they had occasion to determine if the alpha rays traveled in a straight line. Becquerel carried out the work.\n\nHe took some polonium (discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie) and made it into a straight line source, not the usual pencil of rays. He then used this long, narrow beam of alpha rays to make a photograph of a wire. He found that the shadows had sharp edges, even when the alpha rays had gone through a thin film of aluminum.\n\nMarie Curie gave the interpretation of the experiment. She said that this showed that the alpha particles were not scattered, that is, able to be bent from their path. Alpha rays traveled in nice, straight lines ALL THE TIME.\n\nThey were wrong.\n\nWe jump to 1903 and Rutherford announces he has succeeded in bending alpha particles with a magnetic (and an electrical) field. Becquerel, using his different techniques, checks and confirms Rutherford's results.\n\nWhat Becquerel does is aim his radioactive source (radium, now as well as polonium) at a narrow slit with a photographic plate on the other side. Of course, with no magnetic field, he gets a nice, crisp image of the narrow slit, directly in line with the radium source.\n\nWhen he turned on the magnetic field, he got Rutherford's result, that is, the alpha particles bent in the magnetic field.\n\nPart b of the figure shows the offset of the image on the photographic plate. It is not lined up directly with the open slit, labeled Y.\n\nBecquerel also reversed the magentic field's direction during the exposure and got a double image.\n\nThe images were exactly the same distance from the center and the edges of the traces ALWAYS were sharp and crisp.\n\nUp to this point, there was zero evidence of alpha particle scattering.\n\nII. Now, the evidence starts to accumulate\n\nThe work described above was all done in the early part of 1903 and it was in June of 1903 that Becquerel made the first observation that led to alpha particle scattering.\n\nHe noticed, right at the end of his experiments, that the images from the doubled set (when he reversed the magnetic field during the experiment) moved closer together as he moved the photographic plate away from the slit (that is, increased the length b in the diagram above).\n\nIt seemed that the radius of curvature of the alpha particles path through the slit Y increased as b increased, thereby moving the two images closer together.\n\nNow, Becquerel knew this equation:\n\nRH = v (M/E)\n\nR = the radius of curvature, H = the magnetic field strength, v is the velocity, and E/M is the charge-to-mass ratio of the alpha particle. (I know, I know, this equation just came out of nowhere. You'll have to trust me on this one, since I don't know how to derive the equation either.)\n\nWhat Becquerel did is assume E is constant, so this left him with the unpleasant thought that either v or M had to increase. Since it is very had to visualize the alpha particle SPEEDING UP as it traveled from its source, Bequerel decided that M must increase, that the alpha particle picked up stray matter as it traveled along.\n\nHe could not have liked it, but there wasn't anything else he could think of. Since Rutherford was busy with other work, he did not take up any checking on Becquerel's results. However, one Rutherford result will have bearing on scattering. Rutherford found (in July 1905) that the alpha particle decreased in velocity, until at about 6,000 miles per second, it would not make its presence known by ionizing gases or darkening a photographic plate.\n\nIII. We're getting there\n\nThe importance of the slowing down of the alpha particle meant that R (the radius of the curvature in a magnetic field)
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I assume you mean nuclear "bomb"...\n\nIn simplistic terms, and nothing you can't easily find elsewhere, a nuclear bomb is made up of material that fissions (meaning that its atoms can be split to release energy) - this is either Uranium-325 or Plutonium.  Uranium is found in nature but the vast majority is U-238 which doesn't fission - natural uranium must be enriched to create a fissionable amount of uranium - this is true for commercial power reactor fuel too.   Plutonium is made in nuclear reactors from bombarding other materials with neutrons.\n\nTo have a "nuclear yield" the fissionable material in a bomb must be forced into a 'critical mass' configuration which means that it is so dense (atoms close together) that once the material starts to fission and release energy and neutrons, other atoms will capture the released neutons and then they will fission releasing more energy and neutrons and so on and so on with the chain reaction making the boom.\n\nWith the early plutonium bombs (Fat Man), the material was in a sphere and was forced together with high explosives uniformly to create a ball (critical mass). In the first uranium bomb (Little Boy, which they didn't even test until it was dropped on Japan since they were confident it would work) 2 uranium blobs were forced together by essentially thrusting/throwing/shooting one to the other to create the critical mass.  The math behind all this physics is incredibly complex.\n\nTo add bang for the buck they started adding the gas Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, hence the name Hydrogen bomb versus just the Atomic Bomb...  Tritium makes the yield much bigger.
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Einstein theorized that energy and matter are interchangeable. He postulated that nuclear fission takes place via chain-reaction and the energy (measured in ergs) produced from the "splitting of atoms" is equal to the atomic mass of an element multiplied by the speed off light squared (mc2). Einstein wasn't thinking of creating a "bomb" when he first developed the theory. Other nuclear physicist came up with the bomb idea. That is why the isotope of the heaviest element (uranium) was used to make an atomic bomb. Also, a small amount of matter is capable of producing a tremendous amount of energy. The testing of the atomic bomb actually proved Einstein's E=mc2 theory.
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http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm
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Sandia National Laboratories. They sent 200 thousand (million?) amps of electricity through long tungsten wires, which vaporized and emitted a huge dose of radiation, especially X-rays, which amounted to more energy than they had put in. They reported that the temperatures exceeded 2 Billion Kelvin!
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His name was Alessandro Volta.  Alessandro Volta discovered the first practical method of generating electricity.  In 1800, he arranged zinc and copper discs in a column and invented the battery.  His most famous invention was the voltic pile. \n\nThese links should give you all the good stuff!
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In 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming made a chance discovery from an already discarded, contaminated Petri dish. The mold that had contaminated the experiment turned out to contain a powerful antibiotic, penicillin.\n\nRadium was discovered in 1898 by French physicist and Nobel laureate Marie Curie in pitchblende (a uranium and radium-bearing mineral).
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Gamma rays were discovered by the French chemist and physicist, Paul Ulrich Villard in 1900 while he was studying uranium. Working in the chemistry department of the École Normale in rue d'Ulm, Paris with self-constructed equipment, he found that the rays were not bent by a magnetic field.
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A few years ago (1980s) a company was marketing a nuclear device for determining metal content of rocks.  This was a hand held device, and it worked very well.  I don't remember the manufacturer, but I know that it existed, and I saw it work.  The only problem was the nuclear source material.  In order to penetrate to any depth in the rock, it's nuclear source needed to be very powerful.  I think this was considered too much of a liability, and the company quit manufacturing the device.  I'm sure that you can still find one around.  I saw this demonstrated at a geologist's convention in Reno.  I think it was 1983 or 1984.
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The fact that Hitler was trying to take the world over and the fact that Germany succesfully split the U235 atom on 12-19-1938.  Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt a letter describing the destructive power a weapon that utilized nuclear fission would render.  Hence "Project Manhattan" was born.
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location-USA\n\nPhysicist-Oppenheimer\n\nThe Germans had the right idea about how to create a plutonium weapon but failed to get an operable design for the heavy water reactor to convert U238 into Pu239.\n\nThe Manhattan project purified U235 in thousands of centrifuges in Kentucky and built a nuclear weapon that was first tested at the trinity site in white sands New Mexico with what is known as the shotgun design in which a sphere of Uranium with a piece missing is shot with the missing piece creating a complete hypercritical mass.