Really!? You don't think that people were honestly excited about the most energy dense fuel known to man as a low footprint clean energy source? Your lifetime of energy in 1.5 soda cans of fuel! To me this is extremely exciting and totally unrelated to weapons.

Certainly the engineers were, and that's how it was sold to the public. But the people who wrote the checks were mainly interested in weapons.

Yeah the marketing worked so well you can still read it on HN from well-informed nuke fans, even those who would deny being militarists.

I'm definitely a nuclear power proponent, and not a militarist, and I think that the militaristic-ly driven decision to prefer the uranium fuel "cycle" exclusively is the reason we're stuck with these shitty BWR's and PWR's, to the exclusion of anything else. Nuclear as it exists today definitely doesn't live up to the hype, and that's because the nuclear power industry is essentially frozen on 1960's designs, with incremental improvements tacked on. If the auto industry were as slow as the nuclear industry, we'd all be looking forward to next year's new Ford Model C.

I heard that solar panels are used on military satellites...

Some bombs use essentially tiny wind turbines to measure fall, and ready the fuse when far enough from the releasing plane...

Now who's the militarist? :)