Some Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

It’s just like a mule. A mule is a docile, patient beast, and he will give you power to pull a plow for decades, but he wants to kill you. He waits for years and years for that rare, opportune moment when he can turn your lights out with a simple kick to the head.

-Jerry Poole, referring to a nuclear power reactor

Courtesy: Wikipedia 

Nuclear power generation is the way of producing electricity using the phenomena of controlled nuclear fission. A nuclear power plant (NPP), a device used for this purpose, extracts heat given by nuclear fission and coverts this heat energy to electrical energy. Although a NPP has some advantages such as 

1. very low (almost none) greenhouse gases emission
2. low operating cost
3. well-developed technology
4. higher power generation capacity
5. the radioactive gasses emitted are cleaned with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, before they are released to the atmosphere (believe me the smoke coming out of a NPP is actually water vapors raising from the water cooling towers of NPP, it is just a way of forming clouds and nothing to scare about).

 however, if not handle with proper care and required skills, a NPP can become a nightmare and a deadly weapon of total destruction against those to whom it was delivering electricity.

Here I am giving some information about some accidents happened in the history of NPPs. 

1. Chernobyl Power Plant (26 April 1986)

Country: Soviet Union (Russia)

Nature: Steam explosion and meltdown. They were performing an experiment during which one of the four reactor exploded releasing more than 100 times more radiation than was release by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The city of Pripyat (300, 000), Ukraine was evacuated for never to come back.

Causalities: Two people died in the explosion and 28 other died of receiving lethal dose. Thousands of others are thought to be died as a result of the cancer caused by the radiation that spread over almost all Europe.
Cost: 67, 00 million USD

Chernobyl Power Plant

2. Three Mile Island (TMI) Power Plant (29 March 1979)

Country: US

Nature: Partial core meltdown because of core cooling system (CCS) malfunctioning that cause the release of radioactivity on INES Level 5.

Causalities: none.
Cost: 24, 00 million USD

TMI Power Station, US.

3. Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant (11 March 2011)

Country: Japan

Nature: An earthquake of 9.0 magnitude on rector scale generated a powerful tsunami that flood the Fukushima nuclear power plant and damaged four out of six reactors. Fire was set off. Cooling system was failed. The venting hydrogen caused explosions. The loss of coolant cause core meltdown in three reactors. INES level was 7.

Causalities: none from the immediate explosion and radiation levels; however 20 radiation exposure injuries were reported.
Cost: N/A

Fukushima NPP after the disaster. 

Terminology:

 INES: International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (1990 by IAEA), is a logarithmic scale (similar to that use for earthquake magnitude) with each increasing level represents an accident approximately ten times more severe than the previous level.

HEPA: High-Efficiency Particulate Air are filters used to purify the air up to 99.97 % from the radioactive gasses.

Fission Process: The process of splitting apart of nuclei of heavy elements like uranium-235 when a neutron hit it and the resulting release of energy (about 200 MeV per fission).