Nuclear Power Is Just Boiling Water

About

Nuclear Power Is Just Boiling Water refers to a series of memes about power production, primarily nuclear power generation, in which the entire process is exposed as simply boiling water through various means. Started by a 2020 Troll Science meme, the memes maintained a continuous presence in the following years online.

Origin

While jokes about the basic process in nuclear energy production essentially being the boiling of water to generate steam and then pushing turbines to produce electricity appeared prior, the earliest viral meme on the topic (a Troll Science comic) was posted by Twitter^[1] user @380kmh on November 30th, 2020, and gained over 340 retweets and 3,700 likes in two years (seen below). On the same day, the comic was reposted to iFunny,^[2] where it gained over 500 smiles in two years. On Tumblr,^[3] a repost of the comic by user str0kethebigtree then accumulated over 50,000 likes and reblogs in two years.

Spread

On January 7th, 2022, an anonymous 4chan user posted a rant about nuclear power production boiling down to "boiling water" in a /lit/ thread. On January 18th, 2022, Redditor^[4] chr8me posted a screenshot of the post in the /r/4chan subreddit, where it gained over 11,600 upvotes in one year (shown below).

Throughout 2022, multiple memes about boiling water being the basic process in nuclear power production went viral online. For example, on April 9th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user @DSAConstanza posted a tweet that received over 3,900 retweets and 48,700 likes prior to being removed (shown below, left). On September 19th, iFunny^[6] user Mosley_Actual posted a That's It? That's the Lost Episode? meme that was featured on the app and received over 13,100 smiles in four months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References