What are some of the significant and minor nuclear incidents that have happened in the past, and what have the incidents influenced/what where the effects of the incident?
Description (from wikipedia):
Broken Arrow refers to an accidental event that involves nuclear weapons, warheads or components that does not create a risk of nuclear war. These include:
I would go through all of them, however there are 32 USA unredacted cases, there are way more that are not in the USA aswell, here is a pdf with all of the unredacted broken arrow incidents in the us: broken_arrows.pdf
other than broken arrow incidents, there are 2 incidents I'd like to talk about:
1. SL-1 reactor incident
SL-1 was an experamentail version of the reactors in nuclear subs, the incident is diffrent because, it was directly caused by humans, I will be going over a summary of the incident since it is a long story. here it is;
On Tuesday, January 3, 1961, SL-1 was being prepared for restart after a shutdown, Maintenance procedures required that Rod 9 be manually withdrawn a few inches to reconnect it to its drive mechanism. this rod was suddenly withdrawn too far, causing SL-1 to go prompt critical instantly. In four milliseconds, the heat generated by the resulting enormous power excursion caused fuel inside the core to melt and to explosively vaporize.
What happened to the operators? The No. 7 shield plug from the top of the reactor vessel impaled the third man through his groin and exited his shoulder, pinning him to the ceiling. and the spray of water and steam (27 feet per second) knocked the other two operators onto the floor, killing one and severely injuring another.
2. the Demon core
the demon core was a sub-critical plutonium core for a nuclear bomb, it had 2 incidents related to it;
The First incident, On August 21, 1945, 2 scientists where placing nutron reflectors around the core, they had placed one two many reflectors, and the core went supercritical, this killed one scientist in 24 days, the other had their life shortned because of leukemia caused by the core
The Seccond incident, On May 21, 1946, this incident is the more well known, so I'm going to make this short, another scientist used a screw driver to hold a newtron reflector up, the screw driver sliped, making the core go supercritical again, this time alot of people got affected so here is the link to a wiki with all of the affected people
this will be the last incident on this site
this is the windscale fire incident;
On 10 October 1957 in the UK, a graphite-moderated reactor cought fire, and even choking the fire out, didn't put it out, the fire was continuing to get hotter, they had to pump water into the reactor for hours to put it out. 100 to 240 people died, 100 to 240 other people where injured
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