![]() The fire finally died out on October 12, but by that time a radioactive cloud was already spreading across the United Kingdom and Europe. With the reactor on the verge of collapse, plant operators risked their lives to fight the flames with cooling fans, carbon dioxide and water. Upon further inspection, they discovered that the reactor’s uranium-filled graphite core had caught fire. On October 10, 1957, workers conducting standard maintenance at the massive facility noticed rising temperatures. Windscale (October 10, 1957)ĭesigned to produce plutonium and other materials for the country’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program, Britain’s first nuclear reactor, known as Windscale, was built in northwest England in the late 1940s. The Mayak incident has come to be associated with the nearby town of Kyshtym because Ozyorsk did not appear on any official maps at the time. By that time, reports had surfaced of mysterious ailments, including people’s skin sloughing off from exposed body parts. A full week passed before the affected zone’s 10,000 residents were evacuated because the plant was shrouded in secrecy, they received no explanation for their abrupt and permanent resettlement. A plume of deadly particles swelled above Ozyorsk and the surrounding region, eventually spanning some 300 square miles. One of these, the Mayak nuclear fuel processing plant in the Russian town of Ozyorsk, became the site of a major disaster when the cooling system in a waste storage tank failed, causing the dried radioactive material it contained to overheat and explode. ![]() In the years following World War II, the Soviet Union constructed dozens of covert facilities-many of them hastily and shoddily built-in an effort to strengthen their nuclear arsenal. WATCH: Nuclear Terror on HISTORY Vault 1. But when things go wrong, the results are nothing short of catastrophic.īelow, check out five of the most devastating nuclear accidents in history-what caused them, how they were contained (or not) and what happened after. Unlike fossil fuels, nuclear power can provide a relatively stable and environmentally friendly source of energy. Nuclear power kicked into gear in the 1950s, and today some 440 reactors dot the globe, providing an estimated 10 percent of the world's electricity.
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