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Nuclear meltdown. A simulated animation of a core melt in a light-water reactor after a loss-of-coolant accident. After reaching an extremely high temperature, the nuclear fuel and accompanying cladding liquefies and flows to the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel. Three of the reactors at Fukushima I overheated because the cooling systems ...
A nuclear and radiation accident is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 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 a reactor core melt. [ 6 ]
Types of radioactive exposure after a nuclear attack. Radiation poisoning. Toggle Radiation poisoning subsection. Prodromal syndrome. Bone marrow death. Gastrointestinal death. Central nervous system death. Short-term effects (6–8 weeks) Toggle Short-term effects (6–8 weeks) subsection.
Much of the destruction caused by a nuclear explosion is from blast effects. Most buildings, except reinforced or blast-resistant structures, will suffer moderate damage when subjected to overpressures of only 35.5 kilopascals (kPa) (5.15 pounds-force per square inch or 0.35 atm).
A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.
The Chernobyl disaster began on 26 April 1986 with the explosion of the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, near the Belarus border in the Soviet Union. [1] It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at the maximum severity on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other ...
The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The reactor accident began at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, and released radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the ...
Nuclear reactor accidents continued into the 1960s with a small test reactor exploding at the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One in Idaho Falls in January 1961 resulting in three deaths which were the first fatalities in the history of U.S. nuclear reactor operations. [6] There was also a partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear ...