At Fukushima I and II tsunami waves overtopped seawalls and destroyed diesel backup power systems, leading to severe problems including two large explosions at Fukushima I and leakage of radiation.
On March 28, 1979, the Unit 2 nuclear power plant on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI-2) in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg suffered a partial core meltdown.
The Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in American commercial nuclear power generating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community.
The accident unfolded over the course of five tense days, as a number of agencies at local, state and federal level tried to diagnose the problem and decide whether or not the on-going accident required a full emergency evacuation of the population. The full details of the accident were not discovered until much later. In the end, the reactor was brought under control. Although approximately 25,000 people lived within five miles of the island at the time of the accident, no identifiable injuries due to radiation occurred, and a government report concluded that "the projected number of excess fatal cancers due to the accident... is approximately one". But the accident had serious economic and public relations consequences, and the cleanup process was slow and costly. It also furthered a major decline in the public popularity of nuclear power, exemplifying for many the worst fears about nuclear technology and, until the Chernobyl disaster seven years later, it was considered the world's worst civilian nuclear accident.
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station is a nuclear power plant with a single reactor located on the southwest shore of Lake Erie near Oak Harbor, Ohio. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Davis-Besse has been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United States since 1979.
The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown in January 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal by a maintenance team of a single reactor control rod. The event is the only reported fatal reactor accident in the United States.
On October 10, 1957, the graphite core of a British nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumbria, caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area. The event, known as the Windscale fire, was considered the world's worst nuclear accident until the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
The fire itself released an estimated 20,000 curies (700 |terabecquerels) of radioactive material into the nearby countryside. Of particular concern was the radioactive isotope iodine-131, which has a half-life of only 8 days but is taken up by the human body and stored in the thyroid. As a result, consumption of iodine-131 often leads to cancer of the thyroid.
No one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but there was concern that milk might be dangerously contaminated. Milk from about 500 km² of nearby countryside was destroyed (diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea) for about a month.
Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plants 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia. Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents, with a serious accident occurring in 1957.
The 1957 Kyshtym disaster occurred when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules), which released some 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radiation. Subsequently, at least 200 people died of radiation sickness, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation.
Nuclear reactors become easy targets during military conflict and, over the past three decades, have been repeatedly attacked:
Radiation is harmful to health and there have been many accidents caused by radiation:
Parallel port
The parallel port (also known as a printer port or Centronics port) is a type of interface found on computers for connecting various peripherals. A parallel port is a type of interface found on computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. In computing, a parallel port is a parallel communication physical interface. It was a de facto industry standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined a bi-directional version of the port.
The parallel port interface was originally known as the Parallel Printer Adapter on IBM PC-compatible computers. It was primarily designed to operate a line printer that used IBM's 8-bit extended ASCII character set to print text, but could also be used to adapt other peripherals. Graphical printers, along with a host of other devices, have been designed to communicate with the system.
In the 21st century, the parallel port interface is seeing decreasing use because of the rise of Universal Serial Bus (USB) and FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices, along with network printing using Ethernet.
Plastic surgery
Plastic surgery is a surgery that is done to change the way a person's body looks or works. Some plastic surgeries can change both. Work can be done on someone's bones, cartilage, muscles, fat, and skin.
The two most common forms of plastic surgery are reconstruction (fixing body parts that have been damaged) and cosmetic (changing size shape or color of body parts to make them look better). An example of reconstructive plastic surgery is fixing a part of the body that has been burned. An example of cosmetic plastic surgery is a surgery called a "face-lift": pulling the skin of the face tight so that the client looks younger.
Nürburgring
The Nürburgring, known as simply "the Ring" by enthusiasts, is the name of a famous motorsport race track in Nürburg, Germany, built in the 1920s around the village and medieval castle of Nürburg in the Eifel, which is about 70 kilometres south of Cologne, 100 kilometres northwest of Mainz, and 120 kilometres northwest of Frankfurt.
Originally, the track featured four track configurations: the long "Gesamtstrecke" ("Whole Course"), which included the 22.810 km "Nordschleife" ("Northern Loop"), and the 7.747 km "Südschleife" ("Southern Loop"). There also was a 2.281 km warm-up loop called "Zielschleife" ("Finish Loop") or better known as "Betonschleife", around the pit area.
Between 1982 and 1983 the start-finish area was demolished to create a new "GP-Strecke", and this is currently used for all major and international racing events.
Aung San Suu Kyi
Aung San Suu Kyi (born 19 June 1945 in Yangon, Burma) is a human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and State Counsellor of Myanmar.
Suu Kyi was not able to be president. Instead, she became the State Counsellor of Myanmar.
She brought some democracy to her country with nonviolence.
She is the leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma and a famous prisoner. She has been under house arrest several times. Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize in 1990, and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992, she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize.
She is sometimes called "Daw Aung San Suu Kyi". Daw is not part of her name, but a title for older women. This name shows respect for her.
On 1 February 2021, Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and removed from power by the military during a coup d'état. The military declared the November 2020 Myanmar general election results fraudulent. On February 3, she was charged with violating Myanmar's import laws On February 16, Myanmar police filed a second criminal charge against her, this time for violating the country's Natural Disaster Law.