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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]
The Chernobyl disaster [a] 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 the north of the Ukrainian SSR, close to the border with the Byelorussian SSR, in the Soviet Union. [1] It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity ...
In the U.S., at least 56 nuclear reactor accidents have occurred.[2] The most serious of these U.S. accidents was the Three Mile Island accidentin 1979. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Davis–Besse Nuclear Power Stationhas been the source of two of the top five most dangerous nuclear incidents in the United Statessince 1979.
The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale ( INES) was introduced in 1990 [1] by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to enable prompt communication of safety significant information in case of nuclear accidents . The scale is intended to be logarithmic, similar to the moment magnitude scale that is used to ...
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.
A terrorist-caused nuclear detonation is one of 15 disasters scenarios that the federal government continues to plan for with state and city governments — just in case.
Nuclear safety is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "The achievement of proper operating conditions, prevention of accidents or mitigation of accident consequences, resulting in protection of workers, the public and the environment from undue radiation hazards ". The IAEA defines nuclear security as "The prevention and ...
Globally, there have been at least 99 (civilian and military) recorded nuclear power plant accidents from 1952 to 2009 (defined as incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than US$50,000 of property damage, the amount the US federal government uses to define nuclear energy accidents that must be reported), totaling US$20.5 billion in property damages.