International Nuclear Safety Group the Kyshtym disaster, which occurred at Mayak, a Nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Soviet Union. Since then, there have been hundreds of nuclear accidents, some considered minor while others were horrendous, with one of the worst accidents being the Chernobyl disaster of April 26, 1986. Involving a nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, now in Ukraine, a combination of nuclear volatility and the disregard of several safety procedures caused an explosion of its fourth reactor, ending in the worldwide environmental and human catastrophe. Following the Chernobyl accident, the IAEA was forced to create a new branch of their organisation to
Peaceful nuclear explosion that was used to measure and then help model global circulations in the atmosphere by following the movements of fallout aerosols. After the Van Allen Belts surrounding Earth were published about in 1958, James Van Allen suggested that a nuclear detonation would be one way of probing the magnetic phenomenon, data obtained from the August 1958 Project Argus test shots, a high-altitude nuclear explosion investigation, were vital to the early understanding of Earth's magnetosphere. Soviet nuclear physicist and Nobel peace prize recipient Andrei Sakharov also proposed the idea that earthquakes could be mitigated and particle accelerators could be made by