Whether it's nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants, we have been utilizing nuclear weapons to our own detriment, along with the hazards that come with them. Whether it's a nuclear leak from a nuclear power plant, or nuclear contamination from a nuclear weapon, the most famous is Chernobyl. The most famous would be the explosion of the reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. There have been many nuclear leaks in the world. Each of these events has sent shockwaves across the globe.
At 4:30 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the main feedwater pump in the No. 2 reactor of the 950,000-kilowatt pressurized-water reactor power plant at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station stalled, leading to high reactor core temperatures, and by the time operators realized the problem, 47 percent of the core fuel had melted and leaked. The accident caused no injuries, and the Three Mile Island leak was the first reactor core meltdown in the history of nuclear energy.
The No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, spewing more than 8 tons of highly radioactive material mixed with hot graphite debris and nuclear fuel fragments. It is estimated that the radioactive contamination produced after the nuclear leakage accident is equivalent to 100 times the radioactive contamination produced by the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, Japan.
The U.S. Air Force was on a mission on Jan. 21, 1968, when the cabin of a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear bombs caught fire, forcing the crew to abandon the bomber. The bomber crashed on sea ice near Thule Air Base in Greenland, causing the plane's load of nuclear bombs to rupture, resulting in widespread radioactive contamination.
In the more than 20 years since the U.S. ceased above-ground nuclear testing in favor of underground nuclear testing, the Nevada Test Site*** conducted 475 underground nuclear explosions, 62 of which resulted in accidents of varying degrees of severity, according to acknowledgments by officials at the Nevada Test Site. The most serious of these was the December 18, 1970 explosion of a 10,000-ton nuclear bomb code-named "Bainbari". The bomb was housed in a 900-foot-deep, 86-inch-diameter shaft, and when it exploded, the equivalent of 3 million curies of radioactivity was ejected 8,000 feet into the atmosphere within 24 hours, with radioactive fallout drifting all the way to North Dakota.