Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective historian to the NRC which has placed him in an unrivalled position to tell the TMI story. But Harris identifies some omissions in the book. There is little on the other two major nuclear that threatened large civilian populations: the Windscale fire (UK, October 1957), and the Chernobyl disaster (Ukraine, April 1986). Harris states that Windscale threw up similar problems to TMI, particularly relating to whether large-scale evacuations should have been initiated, but he could find no reference to the Windscale accident in the book's index which is surprising in a book that aims to put TMI in historical perspective.
Steam explosion Steam explosion A steam explosion is an explosion caused by violent boiling or flashing of water into steam, occurring when water is either superheated, rapidly heated by fine hot debris produced within it, or heated by the interaction of molten metals (as in a fuel–coolant interaction, or FCI, of molten nuclear-reactor fuel rods with water in a nuclear reactor core following a core-meltdown). Pressure vessels, such as pressurized water (nuclear) reactors, that operate above atmospheric pressure can also provide the conditions for a steam explosion. The water changes from a liquid to a gas with extreme speed, increasing dramatically in