Top 10
Nuclear Disaster/Accident
International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA), has defined nuclear and radiation accident/ disaster as “An
event that has led to significant consequences to people, the environment or
the facility. Examples include lethal effects to individuals, large
radioactivity release to the environment, or reactor core melt.”
Whether accidental or planned,
whatever the form and cause might be, nuclear disaster is a disaster which affects
people physically, mentally, emotionally, economically and genetically,
altering and damaging genes to cause serious effect to generations to come.
We have compiled the major
nuclear disaster/accidents according to their severity.
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10
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Three
Mile Island
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March
28, 1979
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9
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Goiania
Accident
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September
13, 1987
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8
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Windscale
Pile
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October
10, 1957
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7
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Chalk
River Nuclear Accident
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1952
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6
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Castle
Bravo
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March
1, 1954
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5
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Soviet
Submarine K-431 Accident
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August
10, 1985
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4
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Mayak
Nuclear Plant
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September
29, 1957
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3
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Chernobyl
Disaster
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April
26, 1986
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2
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Fukushima
Disaster
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March
11, 2011
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1
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Atomic
Bombings of Hiroshima& Nagasaki World War II,
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1945
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10.
Three Mile Island – March 28, 1979
Three
Mile Island accident (US – 1979) falls under scale 5 nuclear power plant
accidents. On March 28, 1979, in the morning hours, the Three Mile Island
nuclear generating station witnessed a nuclear meltdown of one secondary loop.
This nuclear accident released 13 million curies of radioactive gases into the
atmosphere. Many court cases were also filed on various authorities, concerning
this accident, and they took 15 long years to get settled. Fortunately it led
to no deaths or injuries.
9.
Goiania Accident – September 13, 1987
More than 240 people were
exposed to radiation when a junkyard dealer in Goiania, Brazil, broke open an
abandoned radiation therapy machine and removed a small highly radioactive cake
of cesium chloride. The accident occurred on September 13, 1987. The environment
and surroundings were seriously contaminated. 4 died in this accident. Many
children got attracted to the bright blue of the radioactive material, touched
it and rubbed it on their skin, resulting in the major contamination.
8.
Windscale Pile – October 10, 1957
The accident took place on
October 10, 1957 when a windscale fire ignited plutonium piles and contaminated
surrounding dairy farms. The radioactive contamination caused 33 cancer deaths.
This was the worst nuclear accident in Britain’s history, ranked in severity at
level 5 on the 7-point International Nuclear Event Scale. The fire released an
estimated 20,000 curies of iodine-131, as well as 594 curies of caesium-137 and
24,000 curies of xenon-133, among other radionuclides. The incident produced
around cancer cases. In addition to this, milk farms were seriously
contaminated.
7.
Chalk River Nuclear Accident – 1952
The Chalk River Laboratories
Chalk River Labs and formerly called Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories is a
facility located near Chalk River, Ontario Canada, started in 1942 as a result
of the collaboration between the British and Canadian nuclear research.
On December 12th, 1952, a
reactor shutoff rod failure, combined with several operator errors, led to a
major power excursion of more than double the reactor’s rated output at AECL’s
NRX reactor. INES rated the incident as level 5. A series of hydrogen gas
explosions hurled the four-ton gasholder dome four feet through the air where
it jammed in the superstructure. Thousands of curies of fission products were
released into the atmosphere, and a million gallons of radioactively
contaminated water had to be pumped out of the basement and “disposed of” in
shallow trenches not far from the Ottawa River. The core of the NRX reactor
could not be decontaminated; it had to be buried as radioactive waste.
6.
Castle Bravo – March 1, 1954
1st March 1954 marks
one of the most serious nuclear fallout incidents. United States conducted its
largest ever nuclear weapon test, code-named Castle Bravo, at the Bikini Atoll
in the Marshall Islands. Bravo was part of Operation Castle, a nuclear test
series designed to develop an aircraft-deliverable thermonuclear weapon. Due to
a design error, the explosion reached a yield of 15 megatons, making it two and
a half times larger than expected and more than 1,000 times as powerful as the
Hiroshima bomb. The largest-ever nuclear explosion was the 1961 Tsar Bomba with
50 megatons.
Radioactive fallout from the
test spread over more than 11,000 square kilometres. Traces of radioactive material
were detected in Australia, India, Japan, the United States and Europe. The
Bikini population had been relocated to other atolls prior to the start of the
U.S. nuclear testing programme in the Pacific with the Able test in 1946. Due
to the unfavourable weather conditions in which the Bravo test had been
conducted, the fallout also affected the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Utrik
and others.
5.
Soviet Submarine K-431 Accident – August 10, 1985
Soviet submarine K-431 (originally
the Soviet submarine K-31) was a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine that had a
reactor accident on 10 August 1985. An explosion occurred during refueling of
the submarine at Chazhma Bay, Vladivostok. There were ten fatalities and 49
other people suffered radiation injuries.
4.
Mayak Nuclear Plant – September 29, 1957
A fault in the cooling system
at the nuclear complex, near Chelyabinsk, results in a chemical explosion and
the release of an estimated 70 to 80 tonnes of radioactive materials into the
air. Thousands of people are exposed to radiation and thousands more are
evacuated from their homes. It is categorised as Level 6 on the seven-point
International Nuclear Events Scale (INES).
3.
Chernobyl Disaster – April 26, 1986
The Chernobyl disaster was a
nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power
Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine).
The accident took place in the reactor number 4 near the Pripyat town.
There was a sudden power output surge, and when an emergency shutdown was
attempted, a more extreme spike in power output occurred. This led to a reactor
vessel rupture which caused a series of explosions. Belarus, Russia, and
Ukraine were seriously affected and about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.
From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most
severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. World Health
Organization (WHO) estimates the number of deaths to be 4,000 while a
Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more. Among these varied
figures 31 deaths were confirmed to be caused by the accident. The World Health
Organization reported the radiation release from the Chernobyl accident to be
200 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs combined. It is
considered the most serious nuclear power plant accident in history, and is the
only accident classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event
Scale.
2.
Fukushima Disaster – March 11, 2011
A massive 8.9-magnitude quake
hit northeast Japan on Friday, causing dozens of deaths, more than 80 fires,
and a 10-meter (33-ft) tsunami along parts of the country’s coastline. Homes
were swept away and damage was extensive. And the disaster didn’t end with
this. Eleven reactors at four sites near Japan’s northeast coast were shut down
per seismic emergency procedures. Five reactors at two sites in the Fukushima
prefecture declared emergencies due to loss of normal site power and backup
emergency power. According to a British nuclear expert the explosion at the
Fukushima I nuclear plant looks likely to be a “significant nuclear event” with
a bigger impact on public health than the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island.
As of 15 March, the Finnish nuclear safety authority estimated the accidents at
Fukushima to be at Level 6 on the INES.
On 24 March, a scientific consultant for Greenpeace, working with data
from the Austrian ZAMG and French IRSN, prepared an analysis in which he rated
the total Fukushima I accident at INES level 7.
The accident caused nuclear
contamination in the surrounding environment, water, milk, vegetable and other
food items. People living in
surroundings were moved to safe shelters and food grown in the area was banned for
sale.
1. Atomic
Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – World War II, 1945
These nuclear disasters were
not accidents but an ugly example of human wrath and violence. It was a result
of the war between two big powers of the world. During the final stages of
World War II in 1945, the United States conducted two atomic bombings against
the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the first on August 6, 1945 and
the second on August 9, 1945. This nuclear disaster caused innumerable deaths
and serious physical, emotional and genetic problems which were faced by many
generations. Families were destroyed and people lost their loved ones, home and
money all in one day. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the
acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in
Nagasaki. 15–20% died from radiation sickness, 20–30% from flash burns, and
50–60% from other injuries, compounded by illness. Roughly half of the deaths
in each city occurring on the first day.
A study states that from 1950
to 2000, 46% of leukemia deaths and 11% of solid cancer deaths among bomb
survivors were due to radiation from the bombs. Even after such a huge scale
disaster and setback, the Japanese people faced this situation with courage and
resolution and made Japan one of the leading countries of the world.
Source: atomicarchive.com, Wikipedia,
cnn, nrc.gov