How do nuclear technologies become commonplace? How have the borders between the exceptional and the banal been drawn and redrawn over the last 70 years in order to make nuclear energy part of everyday life? This special issue analyzes the role of fun and display, broadly construed, in shaping the cultural representation and the material circulation (or non‐circulation) of nuclear technologies. Four case studies, covering the United States, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and Ukraine from the 1950s to the 2000s, explore how specific forms of public display and playful practices of cultural production were used as means to banalize (or de‐banalize) nuclear energy. This introduction addresses the main theoretical and historiographical signposts of the special issue and outlines the different ways in which the articles explore them.

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In March 1937, the Technology Museum of Catalonia was created by a governmental order, but it never materialized. How come was a national museum of technology perceived as an urgent need in the midst of the Spanish Civil War? This article explores how this failed attempt was rooted in the long-standing political interest of the engineering community in the musealization of technology in Barcelona. On the one hand, it analyses the tradition of technological display aimed at increasing industrial productivity and improving technical education. On the other hand, it studies the techno-nationalist efforts by engineers to construct a respectable technological past for the nation through display. Finally, it explores how these two approaches would have been articulated in the Technology Museum of Catalonia in the context of the key role played by engineering professionals during the Spanish Civil War.

This article analyzes the politics of nuclear display at the New York Hall of Science in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Hall of Science, which had its beginnings in the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair, featured hands‐on atomic exhibits for children and was planning a monumental Nuclear Science Center with the full support of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Nuclear Science Center would have been the biggest permanent display on nuclear science and technology in the United States and the Atomarium its most spectacular exhibit. At the Atomarium, visitors would have watched a working nuclear reactor go critical from a spiral‐shaped theater‐in‐the‐round while listening to a demonstrator standing on a transparent plexiglass window located right above the reactor core lecturing on peaceful uses of atomic energy. This article analyzes the Hall of Science as a space in which contemporary tensions between nuclear exceptionalism and nuclear banalization were played out. In particular, the article explores how playful and immersive regimes of display played a political role in modulating nuclear fear at a time when, while promoting a private nuclear energy industry, the Atomic Energy Commission encountered growing resistance to nuclear power plants.