Indeed. Nuclear detonations are more about just how much power we can deliver to a place on demand, but we don't really control much of it. Nuclear reactors are about us controlling smaller, though still huge amounts of that power.

Related, while I'm at all into cars, I love the ingenuity behind internal combustion engines - we took a substance that just burns very well and figured that if we can explode very small amounts of it in a container very quickly, we can produce lots of reliable, portable power. We built a whole civilization on top of it.

Cherenkov radiation is just beautiful.