Those concerns vary considerably from nation to nation. In France, for example, more than half of all that country's electrical power now comes from nuclear power plants. By contrast, the initial enthusiasm for nuclear power in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s soon faded, and no new nuclear power plant has been constructed in this country since the mid-1980s. One concern about nuclear power plants, of course, is the memory of the world's first exposure to nuclear power, the atomic bomb blasts. Many people fear that a nuclear power plant may go out of control and explode like a nuclear weapon.
Most experts insist that such an event is impossible.
But a few major disasters continue to remind the public about the worst dangers associated with nuclear power plants. By far the most serious of those disasters was the explosion that occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Kiev in Ukraine in 1986. On April 16th of that year, one of the four power-generating units in the Chernobyl complex exploded, blowing the top off the containment building. Hundreds of thousands of nearby residents were exposed to deadly or damaging levels of radiation and were removed from the area. Radioactive clouds released by the explosion were detected as far away as western Europe.