Nuclear reactor accidents in the United States the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that: "the cumulative effect of all design defects and deficiencies in the design, construction and operations of nuclear power plants makes a nuclear power plant accident, in our opinion, a certain event. The only question is when, and where. On March 28, 1979, equipment failures and operator error contributed to loss of coolant and a partial core meltdown of Unit 2's pressurized water reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. The scope and complexity of this reactor accident became clear over the course of five days, as a number of
Fuel element failure core, into the rest of the primary cooling circuit, increasing contamination levels there. In the EU, some work has been done in which fuel is overheated in a special research reactor named PHEBUS. During these experiments the emissions of radioactivity from the fuel are measured and afterwards the fuel is subjected to Post Irradiation Examination to discover more about what happened to it. Fuel element failure A fuel element failure is a rupture in a nuclear reactor's fuel cladding that allows the nuclear fuel or fission products, either in the form of dissolved radioisotopes or hot particles, to enter the