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 explosion debris. The first man made nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945 at 5:50 am on the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico in the United States, an area now known as the White Sands Missile Range. The event involved the full-scale testing of an implosion-type fission atomic bomb. In a memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of War, General Leslie Groves describes the yield as equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. Following this test, a uranium-gun type nuclear bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with a blast yield