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.
Nuclear safety in the United States that slow the pace and raise the cost of cleanup. The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup. The SL-1, or Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, was a United States Army experimental nuclear power reactor which underwent a steam explosion and meltdown on January 3, 1961, killing its three operators. The direct cause was the improper withdrawal of the central control rod, responsible for absorbing neutrons in the reactor core. The event is