Wild Thing

Wild Thing is rereleasing its bonus episodes! In Ep. 2 of Wild Thing, I mentioned that people went crazy about the gorilla. They even wrote songs about it. But I couldn’t find the music, so I couldn’t play the tune… until now. In a special bonus letters segment, a musical perform ...  Show more

Back for its third season, Wild Thing uses science, history and culture to probe the realities of nuclear energy today, while analyzing our own fascination— and ambivalence—with all things atomic. What are the true risks? And what is the actual potential? Are we better at this th ...  Show more

Two dead men. One man missing. A hole blown in the side of the reactor. A cloud of radioactive gas so hot, it was off the charts. What happened with the SL-1 reactor feeds into our deep fear about the dangers of nuclear energy. But we remain intrigued by the possibilities of an a ...  Show more

How did we figure out that such a tiny particle—an atom—held all that power? For that matter, what is an atom? A primer on the basics of atomic energy—including its destructive capabilities—to help us better understand the events that unfolded roughly 20 years later at SL-1. We’l ...  Show more

The horrifying devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the destructive capabilities of nuclear power. But, in the aftermath of World War II, we started to experiment with how we could use atomic energy for good. It was the dawn of a new era in science, and, in that spirit, t ...  Show more

Two of the men working the reactor that night had personal problems. They hated each other. They fought with their bosses. And those problems could easily distract a man from his work—but what does that mean when you’re working with nuclear materials? At a reactor that, although ...  Show more