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Article: 38 of sgi.talk.ratical
Subject: Partial U.S. Nuclear Accidents List
Keywords: nuclear power isn't clean, safe, or healthy for life on earth
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 8 May 91 16:17:49 GMT
Lines: 341
Partial List of U.S. Nuclear Accidents
While such lists are essential to understanding the impossibility of 100% containment of the most lethal man-made substances ever created on earth, it is critical to realize that many releases of man-made nuclear fission products are not categorized as "accidents" at all, but are the result of "normal" operating procedures carried out by, as Vladimir Chernousenko (Scientific Director of the cleanup of Chernobyl) calls it, the International Nuclear Mafia. These releases fall within the rubric of "permissible levels" as explained by Dr. Ernest Sternglass in his 1982 book, Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island: It therefore seemed reasonable to expect that if such low levels of radioactive waste releases had been achieved in 1957 in the very first nuclear power reactor built in this country, then the later, more advanced plants would release even less. But early in 1970 I discovered that this was not the case. In the published record of the hearings on the environmental effects of electric power generation, held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in November 1969, there were tables supplied by the AEC listing the amounts of radioactivity discharged into the water and air by commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. Many plants were listed as actually releasing hundreds of thousands of times as much radioactivity into the air as others. For example, in 1967 two reactors had discharged as much as 700,000 curies, while another had released only 2.4 curies, or some 300,000 times less.
These were truly enormous quantities. Some of the many different isotopes contained in these gaseous and liquid discharges, such as cesium and strontium, were regarded as hazardous at levels as low as one ten-billionth of a curie per day in milk or food. A single curie of iodine 131 could make 10 billion quarts of milk unfit for continuous consumption, according even to the existing guidelines adopted by the federal government. Such large releases of radioactivity were in fact comparable to fallout from small tactical nuclear weapons. Although dilution in the air would reduce the hazard to people living more than fifty miles away from these plants, those living nearby were unknowingly accepting vastly greater risks to the health of their children.
Furthermore, the permissible levels listed for many of the reactors were enormous. For the Dresden reactor, located some fifty miles from Chicago, which had emitted 260,000 curies of radioactive gases in 1967, the permissible amount had been set at 22,000,000 curies per year by the AEC. Thus, in terms of permissible levels, the huge amount actually released could be, and was, cited by the power company as representing only about 1 percent of the maximum levels allowed. . . .
It was becoming clear that the permissible levels of radiation from nuclear plants could not be lowered, as some scientists were beginning to urge, without having to shut the huge plant down only a few years after it had been built at a cost of well over a hundred million dollars. In fact, pressures were actually building up from industry and the military to raise the permissible discharges to the environment from nuclear activities, especially in the event of an accidental heavy release from a reactor or from fallout if weapons tests in the atmosphere were ever renewed. And so, in 1964 and 1965, the director of the Federal Radiation Council, Dr. Paul C. Tompkins, who had previously served as Deputy Director of the AEC's Office of Radiation Standards and Director of Research in the Bureau of Radiological Health of the U.S. Public Health Service, announced a twentyfold rise in the permissible amounts of the most hazardous isotopes in milk in the event of an accidental release. For the first time in the history of radiation standards the permissible doses to the public were raised rather than lowered, despite the mounting evidence that there was no safe threshold dose of radiation as presented in August 1963 before the Joint Committee. And this was done quietly by presidential executive order, for which no public hearing is required.
When in 1966 the gaseous discharges from the Dresden plant had climbed to 736,000 curies, or more than twenty times what they had been in 1961 and more than twenty million times more than Shippingport had released the same year, a decision was made to start replacing the corroding stainless-steel-jacketed fuel rods with more resistant, but also more expensive, zircalloy-clad fuel. By this time, the liquid releases, containing iodine, strontium, cesium, and other highly toxic elements, had risen to forty-three times their initial value, and, instead of being a small fraction of the permissible level, they had actually reached a full third of the AEC standards. Enormous quantities of these isotopes went into the Illinois River, flowing past Peoria, where the river water began to be used for drinking, and on to the Gulf of Mexico, concentrating thousands of times higher in the fish and in the birds that fed on them - see Secret Fallout, chapter 14, "The Price of Secrecy". Complete ASCII and PostScript versions of this book are also available.
In a 1992 phone interview with Dr. Ernest Sternglass, the Oyster Creek and Millstone nuclear reactors were cited as examples where unimaginably high levels of releases occurred which, although published by Brookhaven National Laboratory in its annual report as required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, never were given any national media attention by the U.S. "free press".
So the enormous cost of the cold war is only now coming home to roost because many of these effects occurred ten, fifteen, twenty years after the events.
DTR: Where's Oyster Creek?
EJS: Oyster Creek is near Atlantic City and New Jersey and it affected all the vegetables and the food that was delivered to New York City. Another serious accidental release occurred at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant (which we only discovered earlier this year) that actually took place in '85-'86 according to the Brookhaven National Laboratory's reports about the releases. Those releases in '85 and '86 combined were equal to what was released from Three Mile Island and yet nobody was told about it. All this occurred right next to the water reservoirs of New York City and Groton, right near where the large amounts of water are stored that are shipped into the metropolitan area. . . .
DTR: When you said Oyster Creek released more than Three Mile Island, how were you able to determine the levels?
EJS: Well, it so happens that in this country the NRC (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) required the publication of the amounts released per year and this was published by the Brookhaven National Laboratory. And that's an annual report that's available to the public.
DTR: So you were able to get their figures.
EJS: Absolutely. Their own figures showed it--and that doesn't even show all the small accidents that were not recorded and all the other releases that went out with steam rather than through the monitored stacks. So we're dealing with enormous contamination of our environment and that is why the government has been so adamant about remaining secret and denying it all trying to blame it on ordinary chemicals, trying to blame everything on DDT, on pesticides, on every other possible material because they have been the worst polluters. In our world today, the governments are the worst polluters--not the chemical industry.
DTR: Oyster Creek is a newer kind--you said is a larger reactor?
EJS: It's the large reactor that was one of the first built by General Electric--a boiling water reactor with only a single loop--and it had many, many terrible problems with large exposures to the workers recorded. Many of the workers died prematurely. I testified in two cases involving workers who worked there. Their own data shows that they had enormous problems of corrosion and leakages and faulty fuel elements and troubles in their chemical cleanup systems. All this resulted in enormous releases.
The largest single release in a single year that ever occurred, occurred actually at the Millstone reactor in Connecticut right near New London where in 1975 they released millions of curies of radioactive gases. We since then have seen a huge increase in cancer rates about which I made a report for Representative Anderson from Connecticut (he's now serving in the Senate). He had asked me to look into this. We studied the releases. They were all available. Because in our country you can get this information by simply going to the local depository where the records have to be kept. All this was sent to me, along with the statistics of Connecticut, and it showed that the cancers rose most in the towns nearest the reactor and declined with distance away in all directions.
Now in the last few years we see an enormous increase in breast cancer on Long Island. In fact the eastern tip of Long Island is just opposite this reactor--it's only twelve miles away. Naturally whenever they had a release, they didn't want to release it when the wind was towards their homes, so they released it when it blew away from shore. When it blows away from shore it goes over to Shelter Island and Eyeslip (sp?) and all the towns in eastern Long Island and that's where there's such an enormous rise in breast cancers is today.
Only last night CBS had a story about this on the evening news. The women are desperate. They're trying to find out what the cause is. They suspect some local kind of chemical but the state health authorities told them there is no basis for any abnormal concern and they should stop being concerned. But the trouble is that the actual figures show that Long Island not only had more cancers than any other area in the eastern United States, but that it was more cancers the further you get away from the pollution of New York. So it can't be blamed on ordinary automobiles. It can't be blamed on benzene. It can't be blamed on chemicals and they haven't been able to find any other explanation.
But naturally the state government of New York, which operates two nuclear reactors actually (one at Indian Point and one near Oswego, near Syracuse), the governments are locked in to their lies because, same as the Russians, they had to deny that all these effects are due to these reactors for fear of enormous lawsuits, for fear of having to shut down all the nuclear plants. The aim of our government has to been to keep the nuclear reactors and the nuclear energy establishment going regardless of how many people they're killing.
Oyster Creek and Millstone excerpts from the November 11, 1992 phone interview transcript with Dr. Ernest Sternglass.
Contrary to what most Americans believe, nuclear power and nuclear devices have not enjoyed a safe history at United States facilities. At least 50 nuclear weapons lie on the ocean bottom due to U.S. and Soviet accidents. A large number of incidents mar the safety record of nuclear plants, facilities, bombers and ships, of which Three Mile Island is only the best remembered. Numerous deaths and injuries resulted from these incidents. The following is a compilation of some of the known events involving nuclear devices and facilities.
21 August 1945
A worker was
killed during the final stages of the Manhattan Project (undertaken at Los Alamos,
New Mexico to develop the first atomic bomb) from a radiation burst released
when a critical assembly of fissile material was accidentally brought together
by hand. This incident pre-dated remote-control assembly of such components,
but the hazards of manual assembly were known at the time. A similar incident
occurred nine months later (dramatized in the Hollywood movie Fat Man and
Little Boy). This time, eight people were exposed, one of whom died days
later.
November 1955
The EBR-I test
reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho experienced a partial meltdown. Radioactivity
registered in the cooling system far from the reactor, and in the ventilation
exhaust ducts.
2 July 1956
Nine persons were
injured when two explosions destroyed a portion of Sylvania Electric Products'
Metallurgy Atomic Research Center in Bayside, Queens, New York.
1957
A radiation release at
the the Keleket company resulted in a five-month decontamination at a cost of
$250,000. A capsule of radium salt (used for calibrating the radiation-measuring
devices produced there) burst, contaminating the building for a full five months.
30 December 1958
A nuclear criticality accident occured from a solution in a plutonium recovery
operation at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. The operator died
later of acute radiation sickness. The March, 1961 Journal of Occupational
Medicine printed a special supplement devoted to the medical analysis
of this accident.
5 October 1966
A sodium cooling
system malfunction caused a partial core meltdown at Detroit Edison's Enrico
Fermi I demonstration breeder reactor near Detroit, Michigan. Radioactive gases
leaked into the containment structures, but radiation was reportedly contained.
1974
Whistleblowers at the Isomedix
company in New Jersey reported that radioactive water was flushed down toilets
and had contaminated pipes leading to sewers. The same year a worker received
a dose of radiation considered lethal, but was saved by prompt hospital treatment.
1982
International Nutronics
in Dover, New Jersey, which used radiation baths to purify gems, chemicals,
food, and medical supplies, experienced an accident that completely contaminated
the plant, forcing its closure. A pump malfunctioned, siphoning water from the
baths onto the floor; the water eventually was drained into the sewer system
of the heavily populated town of Dover. The NRC wasn't informed of the accident
until ten months later -- and then by a whistleblower, not the company. In 1986,
the company and one of its top executives were convicted by a federal jury of
conspiracy and fraud. Radiation has been detected in the vicinity of the plant,
but the NRC claims the levels "aren't hazardous."
1986
The NRC revoked the license
of a Radiation Technology, Inc. (RTI) plant in New Jersey for repeated worker
safety violations. RTI was cited 32 times for various violations, including
throwing radioactive garbage out with the regular trash. The most serious violation
was bypassing a safety device to prevent people from entering the irradiation
chamber during operation, resulting in a worker receiving a near-lethal dose
of radiation.
ca. December 1991
One of four
cold fusion cells in a Menlo Park, CA, laboratory exploded while being moved;
electrochemist Andrew Riley was killed and three others were injured. The other
three cells were buried on site, leading to rumors that a nuclear reaction had
taken place. A report concluded that it was a chemical explosion; a mixture
of oxygen and deuterium produced by electrolysis ignited when a catalyst was
exposed. The Electric Power Research Institute, which spent $2 million on the
SRI cold fusion research, suspended support for the work pending the outcome
of an investigation.
The nuclear power plant is a particularly nefarious use of nuclear energy. Unlike conventional power plants, nuclear plants have a relatively short life-span -- 30 years -- before critical reactor components become irreparably radioactive. At that point the plant must be decommissioned (`mothballed') at a cst of over $100 million, or else its entire reactor core replaced. To date, there is no solution regarding where to store spent power plant reactor cores. Compounding the storage problem is an accumulation of spent radioactive fuel rods, which have a life-span of only three years.
March 1957
The "WASH-740" (aka "Brookhaven") report, detailing the likelihood and extent of a nuclear power plant accident, was released. The report estimated that a nuclear plant accident could incur up to $7 billion in property damage alone (aside from payments for loss of life and injuries). These figures were confirmed in a second report (the "Gomberg" report) four months later. Because of the risk, insurance companies refused to insure nuclear power plants. The Price-Anderson Act was passed the following September, whereby the federal government agreed to provide most of the cost of insurance for nuclear power plants.
3 January 1961
A reactor explosion
(possibly attributable to sabotage, according to one Nuclear Regulatory Commission
member) at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, killed
one navy technician and two army technicians, and released radioactivity "largely
confined" (words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission)
to the reactor building. The three men were killed as they moved fuel rods in
a "routine" preparation for the reactor start-up. One technician was
blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. His
body remained there until it was taken down six days later. The men were so
heavily exposed to radiation that their hands had to be buried separately with
other radioactive wastem, and their bodies were interred in lead coffins.
19 November 1971
The water storage
space at the Northern States Power Company's reactor in Monticello, Minnesota
filled to capacity and spilled over, dumping about 50,000 gallons of radioactive
waste water into the Mississippi River. Some was taken into the St. Paul water
system.
March 1972
Senator Mike Gravel
of Alaska submitted to the Congressional Record facts surrounding a routine
check in a nuclear power plant which indicated abnormal radioactivity in the
building's water system. Radioactivity was confirmed in the plant drinking fountain.
Apparently there was an inappropriate cross-connection between a 3,000 gallon
radioactive tank and the water system.
28 May 1974
The Atomic Energy
Commission reported that 861 "abnormal events" had occurred in 1973
in the nation's 42 operative nuclear power plants. Twelve involved the release
of radioactivity "above permissible levels."
22 March 1975
A technician checking
for air leaks with a lighted candle caused $100 million in damage when insulation
caught fire at the Browns Ferry reactor in Decatur, Alabama. The fire burned
out electrical controls, lowering the cooling water to dangerous levels, and
requiring a manual shutdown of the plant.
28 March 1979
A major accident
at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. At 4:00
a.m. a series of human and mechanical failures nearly triggered a nuclear disaster.
By 8:00 a.m., after cooling water was lost and temperatures soared above 5,000
degrees, the top half of the reactor's 150-ton core collapsed and melted. Contaminated
coolant water escaped into a nearby building, releasing radioactive gasses,
leading as many as 200,000 people to flee the region. Despite claims by the
nuclear industry that "no one died at Three Mile Island," a study
by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University
of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths.
1981
The Critical Mass Energy
Project of Public Citizen, Inc. reported that there were 4,060 mishaps and 140
serious events at nuclear power plants in 1981, up from 3,804 mishaps and 104
serious events the previous year.
11 February 1981
An Auxiliary
Unit Operator, working his first day on the new job without proper training,
inadvertently opened a valve which led to the contamination of eight men by
110,000 gallons of radioactive coolant sprayed into the containment building
of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Sequoyah I plant in Tennessee.
1982
The Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen, Inc. reported that 84,322 power plant workers were exposed to radiation in 1982, up from 82,183 the previous year.
25 January 1982
A steam generator
pipe broke at the Rochester Gas & Electric Company's Ginna plant near Rochester,
New York. Fifteen thousand gallons of radioactive coolant spilled onto the plant
floor, and small amounts of radioactive steam escaped into the air.
15-16 January 1983
Nearly 208,000
gallons of water with low-level radioactive contamination was accidentally dumped
into the Tennesee River at the Browns Ferry power plant.
1988
It was reported that there
were 2,810 accidents in U.S. commercial nuclear power plants in 1987, down slightly
from the 2,836 accidents reported in 1986, according to a report issued by the
Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen, Inc.
25 February 1993
A catastrophe
at the Salem 1 reactor in New Jersey was averted by just 90 seconds when the
plant was shut down manually, following the failure of automatic shutdown systems
to act properly. The same automatic systems had failed to respond in an incident
three days before, and other problems plagued this plant as well, such as a
3,000 gallon leak of radioactive water in June 1981 at the Salem 2 reactor,
a 23,000 gallon leak of "mildly" radioactive water (which splashed
onto 16 workers) in February 1982, and radioactive gas leaks in March 1981 and
September 1982 from Salem 1.
28 May 1993
The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission released a warning to the operators of 34 nuclear reactors around
the country that the instruments used to measure levels of water in the reactor
could give false readings during routine shutdowns and fail to detect important
leaks. The problem was first bought to light by an engineer at Northeast Utilities
in Connecticut who had been harassed for raising safety questions. The flawed
instruments at boiling-water reactors designed by General Electric utilize pipes
which were prone to being blocked by gas bubbles; a failure to detect falling
water levels could have resulted, potentially leading to a meltdown.
13 February 1950
A B-36 en route
from Alaska to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas, developed serious
mechanical difficulties, complicated by severe icing conditions, leading to
the world's first nuclear accident. The crew headed out over the Pacific Ocean
and dropped the nuclear weapons from 8,000 feet off the coast of British Columbia.
The weapons' high-explosive material detonated on impact, but the crew parachuted
to safety.
27 July 1956
A U.S. B-47 practicing
a touch-and-go landing at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Station near Cambridge,
England went out of control and smashed into a storage igloo housing three Mark
6 nuclear bombs, each of which had about 8,000 pounds of TNT in its trigger
mechanism. No crewmen were killed, and fire fighters were able to extinguish
the blazing jet fuel before it ignited the TNT.
22 May 1957
A 10 megaton hydrogen
bomb was accidentally dropped from a bomber in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque,
New Mexico owned by the University of New Mexico. The conventional explosives
detonated, creating a 12 foot deep crater 25 feet across in which some radiation
was detected.
28 July 1957
A C-124 "Globemaster"
transporting three nuclear weapons and a nuclear capsule from Dover Air Force
Base in Delaware to Europe experienced loss of power in two engines. The crew
jettisoned two of the weapons somewhere east of Rehobeth, Del., and Cape May/Wildwood,
New Jersey. A search for the weapons was unsuccessful and it is a fair assumption
that they are still there at the bottom of the ocean.
31 January 1958
Unbeknownst
to Moroccan officials, a B-47 loaded with a fully-armed nuclear weapon crashed
at a U.S. Strategic Air Command base 90 miles northeast of Rabat. The Air Force
evacuated everyone within 1 mile of the base while the bomber burned for seven
hours. During cleanup operations a large number of vehicles and aircraft were
contaminated with radiation.
5 February 1958
A B-47 collided
with another jet and a hydrogen bomb was accidentally dropped, never to be recovered,
in the ocean off Savannah, Georgia.
11 March 1958
A B-47 on its
way from Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia to an overseas base accidentally dropped
an unarmed nuclear weapon into the garden of Walter Gregg and his family in
Mars Bluff, South Carolina. The conventional explosives detonated, destroying
Gregg's house and injuring six family members. The blast resulted in the formation
of a crater 50-70 feet wide and 25-30 feet deep. Five other houses and a church
were also damaged; five months later the Air Force paid the Greggs $54,000 in
compensation.
4 November 1958
A B-47 with
nuclear bombs caught fire in mid-air, crashing in Texas.
15 October 1959
A B-52 with
two nuclear bombs collided in mid-air with a KC-135 jet tanker and crashed in
Kentucky. Both bombs were recovered.
7 June 1960
A BOMARC-A nuclear
missile burst into flamesafter its fuel tank was ruptured by the explosion of
a highpressure helium tank at McGuire Air Force Base in New Egypt, New Jersey.
The missile melted, causing plutonium contamination at the facility and in the
ground water below.
24 January 1961
A B-52 with
nuclear bombs fell apart in mid-air over North Carolina, killing three of the
eight crewmen and releasing two 24-megaton nuclear bombs. One bomb parachuted
to the ground and was recovered; the other fell free and landed in waterlogged
farmland, never to be found. When the recovered bomb was studied, it was found
that five of its six safety devices had failed.
14 March 1961
A B-52 with nuclear
bombs crashed in California while on a training mission.
13 January 1964
A B-52 with
two nuclear weapons crashed near Cumberland, Maryland.
17 January 1966
A B-52 collided
with an Air Force KC-135 jet tanker while refueling over the coast of Spain,
killing eight of the eleven crew members and igniting the KC-135's 40,000 gallons
of jet fuel. Two hydrogen bombs ruptured, scattering radioactive particles over
the fields of Palomares; a third landed intact near the village of Palomares;
the fourth was lost at sea 12 miles off the coast of Palomares and required
a search by thousands of men working for three months to recover it. Approximately
1,500 tons of radioactive soil and tomato plants were removed to the U.S. for
burial at a nuclear waste dump in Aiken, S.C. The U.S. eventually settled claims
by 522 Palomares residents at a cost of $600,000, and gave the town the gift
of a $200,000 desalinizing plant.
22 January 1968
A B-52 crashed
7 miles south of Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, scattering the radioactive
fragments of four hydrogen bombs over the terrain after a fire broke out in
the navigator's compartment. The contaminated ice and airplane debris were sent
back to the U.S., with the bomb fragments going back to the manufacturer in
Amarillo, Tx. The incident outraged the people of Denmark (which owned Greenland
at the time, and which prohibits nuclear weapons over its territory) and led
to massive anti-U.S. demonstrations. One of the warheads was recovered in 1979
by Navy Seals and Seabees.
24 July 1969
U.S. missile production
was temporarily suspended due to a serious fire at the Atomic Energy Commission's
Rocky Flats plutonium bomb factory. The surrounding countryside was irradiated
by plutonium, and several buildings at the factory were so badly contaminated
that they had to be dismantled.
2 November 1981
A fully-armed
Poseidon missile was accidentally dropped 17 feet from a crane in Scotland during
a transfer operation between a U.S. submarine and its mother ship.
Some of the following incidents involve the discharge of radioactive coolant water by ships and submarines. While water from the primary coolant system stays radioactive for only a few seconds, it picks up bits of cobalt, chromium and other elements (from rusting pipes and the reactor) which remain radioactive for years. In realization of this fact, the U.S. Navy has curtailed its previously frequent practice of dumping coolant at sea.
1954
An experimental sodium-cooled
reactor utilized aboard the USS Seawolf, the U.S.'s second nuclear submarine,
was scuttled in 9,000 feet of water off the Delawre/Maryland coast. The reactor
was plagued by persistent leaks in its steam system (caused by the corrosive
nature of the sodium) and was later replaced with a more conventional model.
The reactor is estimated to have contained 33,000 curies
of radioactivity and is likely the largest single radioactive object ever dumped
deliberately into the ocean. Subsequent attempts to locate the reactor proved
to be futile.
October 1959
One man was killed
and another three were seriously burned in the explosion and fire of a prototype
reactor for the USS Triton at the Navy's training center in West Milton, New
York. The Navy stated, "The explosion...was completely unrelated to the
reactor or any of its principal auxiliary systems," but sources familiar
with the operation claim that the high-pressure air flask which exploded was
utilized to operate a critical back-up system in the event of a reactor emergency.
1961
The USS Theodore Roosvelt
was contaminated when radioactive waste from its demineralization system, blew
back onton the ship after an attempt to dispose of the material at sea. This
happened on other occasions as well with other ships (for example, the USS Guardfish
in 1975).
10 April 1963
The nuclear submarine
Thresher imploded during a test dive east of Boston, killing all 129 men aboard.
1968
Radioactive coolant water
may have been released by the USS Swordfish, which was moored at the time in
Sasebo Harbor in Japan. According to one source, the incident was alleged by
activists but a nearby Japanese government vessel failed to detect any such
radiation leak. The purported incident was protested bitterly by the Japanese,
with Premier Eisaku Sate warning that U.S. nuclear ships would no longer be
allowed to call at Japanese ports unless their safety could be guaranteed.
21 May 1968
The U.S.S. Scorpion,
a nuclear-powered attack submarine carrying two Mark 45 ASTOR torpedoes with
nuclear warheads, sank mysteriously on this day. It was eventually photographed
lying on the bottom of the ocean, where all ninety-nine of its crew were lost.
Details of the accident remained classified until November 1993, when the Navy
admitted that it had suspected all long that the Scorpion had accidentally been
torpedoed by an American vessel. The nuclear material was never recovered.
14 January 1969
A series of
explosions aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise left 17 dead and 85
injured.
16 May 1969
The U.S.S. Guitarro,
a $50 million nuclear submarine undergoing final fitting in San Francisco Bay,
sank to the bottom as water poured into a forward compartment. A House Armed
Services subcommittee later found the Navy guilty of "inexcusable carelessness"
in connection with the event.
12 December 1971
Five hundred
gallons of radioactive coolant water spilled into the Thames River near New
London, Connecticut as it was being transferred from the submarine Dace to the
sub tender Fulton.
October-November 1975
The USS
Proteus, a disabled submarine tender, discharged significant amounts of radioactive
coolant water into Guam's Apra Harbor. A geiger counter check of the harbor
water near two public beaches measured 100 millirems/hour, fifty times the allowable
dose.
22 May 1978
Up to 500 gallons
of radioactive water was released when a valve was mistakenly opened aboard
the USS Puffer near Puget Sound in Washington.
26 April 1953
Radioactive rain,
the result of above-ground nuclear tests, fell on Troy, New York.
5 September 1961
President Kennedy
ordered the resumption of nuclear testing, "underground, with no fallout."
10 December 1961
Clouds of radioactive
steam escaped from an underground nuclear test, closing several New Mexico highways.
9 December 1968
Clouds of radioactive
steam from a nuclear test in Nevada broke through the ground, releasing fallout
and violating the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed 5 years earlier.
18 December 1970
An underground
nuclear test in Nevada resulted in a cloud of radioactive steam to be thrust
8,000 feet in the air over Wyoming.
From 1946 to 1970 approximately 90,000 cannisters of radioactive waste were jettisoned in 50 ocean dumps up and down the East and West coasts of the U.S., including prime fishing areas, as part of the early nuclear waste disposal program from the military's atomic weapons program. The waste also included contaminated tools, chemicals, and laboratory glassware from weapons laboratories, and commercial/medical facilities
1958
In one of nine transportation
accidents involving nuclear materials, a tank trailer carrying 1,500 gallons
of uranium fluid overturned in Hanford, Washington, when its brakes failed on
a hill. The contaminated fluid was flushed into a ditch and the surrounding
soil was removed to a waste site. Another trailer truck carrying uranium gas
overturned the same year in Bardstown, Kentucky, leaking some of its load.
1971
After experimenting with
disposal of radioactive waste in salt, the Atomic Energy Commission announced
that "Project Salt Vault" would solve the waste problem. But when
180,000 gallons of contaminated water was pumped into a borehole; it promptly
and unexpectedly disappeared. The project was abandoned two years later.
1972
The West Valley, NY fuel
reprocessing plant was closed after 6 years in operation, leaving 600,000 gallons
of high-level wastes buried in leaking tanks. The site caused measurable contamination
of Lakes Ontario and Erie.
December 1972
A major fire and
two explosions occurred at a Pauling, New York plutonium fabrication plant.
An undetermined amount of radioactive plutonium was scattered inside and outside
the plant, resulting in its permanent shutdown.
1979
The Critical Mass Energy
Project (part of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, Inc.) tabulated 122 accidents
involving the transport of nuclear material in 1979, including 17 involving
radioactive contamination.
16 July 1979
A dam holding radioactive
uranium mill tailings broke, sending an estimated 100 million gallons of radioactive
liquids and 1,100 tons of solid wastes downstream at Church Rock, New Mexico.
August 1979
Highly enriched
uranium was released from a top-secret nuclear fuel plant near Erwin, Tennessee.
About 1,000 people were contaminated with up to 5 times as much radiation as
would normally be received in a year. Between 1968 and 1983 the plant "lost"
234 pounds of highly enriched uranium, forcing the plant to be closed six times
during that period.
January 1980
A 5.5 Richter earthquake
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where large amounts of nuclear material
are kept, caused a tritium leak.
19 September 1980
An Air Force
repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo dropped a wrench
socket, which rolled off a work platform and fell to the bottom of the silo.
The socket struck the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank.
The missile complex and surrounding areas were evacuated. Eight and a half hours
later, the fuel vapors ignited, causing an explosion which killed an Air Force
specialist and injured 21 others. The explosion also blew off the 740-ton reinforced
concrete-and-steel silo door and catapulted the warhead 600 feet into the air.
The silo has since been filled in with gravel, and operations have been transferred
to a similar installation at Rock, Kansas.
21 September 1980
Two canisters
containing radioactive materials fell off a truck on New Jersey's Route 17.
The driver, en route from Pennsylvania to Toronto, did not notice the missing
cargo until he reached Albany, New York.
1983
The Department of Energy
confirmed that 1,200 tons of mercury had been released over the years from the
Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Components Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the U.S.'s earliest
nuclear weapons production plant. In 1987, the DOE also reported that PCBs,
heavy metals, and radioactive substances were all present in the groundwater
beneath Y-12. Y-12 and the nearby K-25 and X-10 plants were found to have contaminated
the atmosphere, soil and streams in the area.
December 1984
The Fernald Uranium
Plant, a 1,050-acre uranium fuel production complex 20 miles northwest of Cincinnati,
Ohio, was temporarily shut down after the Department of Energy disclosed that
excessive amounts of radioactive materials had been released through ventilating
systems. Subsequent reports revealed that 230 tons of radioactive material had
leaked into the Greater Miami River valley during the previous thirty years,
39 tons of uranium dust had been released into the atmosphere, 83 tons had been
discharged into surface water, and 5,500 tons of radioactive and other hazardous
substances had been released into pits and swamps where they seeped into the
groundwater. In addition, 337 tons of uranium hexafluoride was found to be missing,
its whereabouts completely unknown. In 1988 nearby residents sued and were granted
a $73 million settlement by the government. The plant was not permanently shut
down until 1989.
1986
A truck carrying low-level
radioactive material swerved to avoid a farm vehicle, went off a bridge on Route
84 in Idaho, and dumped part of its cargo in the Snake River. Officials reported
the release of radioactivity.
6 January 1986
A container of
highly toxic gas exploded at The Sequoyah Fuels Corp. uranium processing factory
in Gore, Oklahoma, causing one worker to die (when his lungs were destroyed)
and 130 others to seek medical treatment. In response, the Government kept the
plant closed for more than a year and fined owners Kerr-McGee $310,000, citing
poorly trained workers, poorly maintained equipment and a disregard for safety
and the environment. [See also 24 November 1992.]
1986
After almost 40 years of
cover-ups, the U.S. Government released 19,000 pages of previously classified
documents which revealed that the Hanford Engineer Works was responsible for
the release of significant amounts of radioactive materials into the atmosphere
and the adjacent Columbia River. Between 1944 and 1966, the eight reactors,
a source of plutonium production for atomic weapons, discharged billions of
gallons of liquids and billions of cubic meters of gases containing plutonium
and other radioactive contaminants into the Columbia River, and the soil and
air of the Columbia Basin. Although detrimental effects were noticed as early
as 1948, all reports critical of the facilities remained classified. By the
summer of 1987, the cost of cleaning up Hanford was estimated to be $48.5 billion.
The Technical Steering Panel of the government-sponsored Hanford Environmental
Dose Reconstruction Project released the following statistics in July 1990:
Of the 270,000 people living in the affected area, most received low doses of
radiation from Iodine, but about 13,500 received a total dose some 1,300 times
the annual amount of airborne radiation considered safe for civilians by the
Department of Energy. Approximately 1,200 children received doses far in excess
of this number, and many more received additional doses from contaminants other
than Iodine.
1987
The Idaho Falls Post Register
reported that plutonium had been found in sediments hundreds of feet below the
Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, an experimental reactor testing station
and nuclear waste storage site.
1988
The National Research Council
panel released a report listing 30 "significant unreported incidents"
at the Savannah River production plants over the previous 30 years. As at Hanford
(see 1986), ground water contamination resulted from pushing production of radioactive
materials past safe limits at this weapons complex. In January 1989, scientists
discovered a fault running under the entire site through which contaminants
reached the underground aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the southeast.
Turtles in nearby ponds were found to contain radioactive strontium of up to
1,000 times the normal background level.
6 June 1988
Radiation Sterilizers,
Incorporated reported that a leak of Cesium-137 had occurred at their Decatur,
Georgia facility. Seventy thousand medical supply containers and milk cartons
were recalled as they had been exposed to radiation. Ten employees were also
exposed, three of whom "had enough on them that they contaminated other
surfaces" including materials in their homes and cars, according to Jim
Setser at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
October 1988
The Rocky Flats,
Colorado plutonium bomb manufacturing site was partially closed after two employees
and a Department of Energy inspector inhaled radioactive particles. Subsequent
investigations revealed safety violations (including uncalibrated monitors and
insufficient fire-response equipment) and leaching of radioactive contaminants
into the local groundwater.
24 November 1992
The Sequoyah Fuels Corp. uranium processing factory in Gore, Oklahoma closed
after repeated citations by the Government for violations of nuclear safety
and environmental rules. It's record during 22 years of operation included an
accident in 1986 that killed one worker and injured dozens of others and the
contamination of the Arkansas River and groundwater. The Sequoyah Fuels plant,
one of two privately-owned American factories that fabricated fuel rods and
armor-piercing bullet shells, had been shut down a week before by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission when an accident resulted in the release of toxic gas.
Thirty-four people sought medical attention as a result of the accident. The
plant had also been shut down the year before when unusually high concentrations
of uranium were detected in water in a nearby construction pit. [Also see 6
January 1986 for details of an additional incident.] A Government investigation
revealed that the company had known for years that uranium was leaking into
the ground at levels 35,000 times higher than Federal law allows; Carol Couch,
the plant's environmental manager, was cited by the Government for obstructing
the investigation and knowingly giving Federal agents false information.
31 March 1994
Fire at a nuclear
research facility on Long Island, New York resulted in the nuclear contamination
of three fire fighters, three reactor operators, and one technician. Measurable
amounts of radioactive substances were released into the immediate environment.
16 November 1996
A Department
of Energy trailer overturned near Valentine, Nebraska shortly after 1:00 am.
It had been travelling in blizzard conditions, in direct contravention of DOE
regulations. The truck was transporting warheads (described in the press as
"classified cargo"; later confirmed by Colorado senators to be weapons)
from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to the Pantex facility near Amarillo,
Texas. The weapons were recovered undamaged after a 24 hour operation.
14 March 1997
A 40 gallon tank
of toxic chemicals (stored illegally at the U.S. Government's Hanford Engineer
works) exploded, causing the release of 20,000-30,000 gallons of plutonium-contaminated
water. A cover-up ensued, involving the contractors doing clean-up (see extensive
discussion of this facility at "1986") and the Department of Energy,
who denied the release of radioactive materials. They also told eight plant
workers that tests indicated that they hadn't been exposed to plutonoium even
though no such tests actually were conducted. (Later testing revealed that in
fact they had not been exposed.)
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