page_title: Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents
section_title: Radiation and other accidents and incidents
hierarchical_section_title: Nuclear and radiation accidents and incidents / Radiation and other accidents and incidents
caption_attribution_description: English: Joseph Hamilton with radio sodium experiment in Berkeley, California, January, 1939.
context_page_description: A nuclear and radiation accident is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency as "an event that has led to significant consequences to people, the environment or the facility". Examples include lethal effects to individuals, radioactive isotope to the environment, or reactor core melt." The prime example of a "major nuclear accident" is one in which a reactor core is damaged and significant amounts of radioactive isotopes are released, such as in the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
  The impact of nuclear accidents has been a topic of debate since the first nuclear reactors were constructed in 1954, and has been a key factor in public concern about nuclear facilities. Technical measures to reduce the risk of accidents or to minimize the amount of radioactivity released to the environment have been adopted, however human error remains, and "there have been many accidents with varying impacts as well near misses and incidents". As of 2014, there have been more than 100 serious nuclear accidents and incidents from the use of nuclear power.
context_section_description: Serious radiation and other accidents and incidents include:
  1940s
  May 1945: Albert Stevens was one of several subjects of a human radiation experiment, and was injected with plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent. Although Stevens was the person who received the highest dose of radiation during the plutonium experiments, he was neither the first nor the last subject to be studied. Eighteen people aged 4 to 69 were injected with plutonium. Subjects who were chosen for the experiment had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. They lived from 6 days up to 44 years past the time of their injection. Eight of the 18 died within two years of the injection. All died from their preexisting terminal illness, or cardiac illnesses. None died from the plutonium itself. Patients from Rochester, Chicago, and Oak Ridge were also injected with plutonium in the Manhattan Project human experiments.
  6–9 August 1945: On the orders of President Harry S. Truman, a uranium-gun design bomb, Little Boy, was used against the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Fat Man, a plutonium implosion-design bomb was used against the city of Nagasaki. The two weapons killed approximately 120,000 to 140,000 civilians and military personnel instantly and thousands more have died over the years from radiation sickness and related cancers.
  August 1945: Criticality accident at US Los Alamos National Laboratory. Harry Daghlian dies.
  May 1946: Criticality accident at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Louis Slotin dies.
  1950s
  13 February 1950: a Convair B-36B crashed in northern British Columbia after jettisoning a Mark IV atomic bomb. This was the first such nuclear weapon loss in history.
  12 December 1952: NRX AECL Chalk River Laboratories, Chalk River, Ontario, Canada. Partial meltdown, about 10,000 Curies released. Approximately 1202 people were involved in the two year cleanup. Future president Jimmy Carter was one of the many people that helped clean up the accident.
  15 March 1953: Mayak, former Soviet Union. Criticality accident. Contamination of plant personnel occurred.
  1 March 1954: The 15 Mt Castle Bravo shot of 1954 which spread considerable nuclear fallout on many Pacific islands, including several which were inhabited, and some that had not been evacuated.
  1 March 1954: Daigo Fukuryū Maru, Japanese fishing vessel contaminated by fallout from Castle Bravo, 1 fatality.
  2 March 1954: US Navy tanker USS Patapsco contaminated by fallout from Castle Bravo while sailing from Enewetak Atoll to Pearl Harbor.
  September 1957: a plutonium fire occurred at the Rocky Flats Plant, which resulted in the contamination of Building 71 and the release of plutonium into the atmosphere, causing US$818,600 in damage.
  21 May 1957: Mayak, former Soviet Union. Criticality accident in the factory number 20 in the collection oxalate decantate after filtering sediment oxalate enriched uranium. Six people received doses of 300 to 1,000 rem (four women and two men), one woman died.
  29 September 1957: Kyshtym disaster: Nuclear waste storage tank explosion at the same Mayak plant, Russia. No immediate fatalities, though up to 200+ additional cancer deaths might have ensued from the radioactive contamination of the surrounding area; 270,000 people were exposed to dangerous radiation levels. Over thirty small communities were removed from Soviet maps between 1958 and 1991. (INES level 6)
  October 1957: Windscale fire, UK. Fire ignites a "plutonium pile" (an air cooled, graphite moderated, uranium fuelled reactor that was used for plutonium and isotope production) and contaminates surrounding dairy farms. An estimated 33 cancer deaths.
  1957-1964: Rocketdyne located at the Santa Susanna Field Lab, 30 miles north of Los Angeles, California operated ten experimental nuclear reactors. Numerous accidents occurred including a core meltdown. Experimental reactors of that era were not required to have the same type of containment structures that shield modern nuclear reactors. During the Cold War time in which the accidents that occurred at Rocketdyne, these events were not publicly reported b
caption: Dr. Joseph G. Hamilton was the primary researcher for the human plutonium experiments done at U.C. San Francisco from 1944 to 1947.[50] Hamilton wrote a memo in 1950 discouraging further human experiments because the AEC would be left open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had "a little of the Buchenwald touch."[51]
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