03
Powering a City
Start with a single fissioning atom and trace the unbroken line of cause and effect to a lamp switching on in a stranger’s apartment.
Most of us know a nuclear plant “makes electricity” the way we know bread “comes from wheat”: true, and useless. This piece refuses the shortcut. You begin at a single atom splitting and you follow the energy by hand: heat, to steam, to a spinning turbine, to a wire, to a city, to one specific window going from dark to gold. Nothing is skipped, because the skipped parts are where the wonder hides.
interactive · follow the energy, atom to windowopen full screen ↗
Notes from the making
I built this one as a single continuous path on purpose. You can scrub it forward and back, but you can never jump. The magic of a power plant is that it is a chain with no missing links, and I wanted that to be physically true of the interaction.
The last frame, the window, went through forty versions. It needed to feel like a person, not a pixel. The whole gigawatt argument lands on that one warm rectangle.
This is the featured piece because it answers a question almost no one asks out loud: where, exactly, does my light come from? The honest answer is a story, and stories deserve room.