Nuclear reactor accidents in the United States reactors and research facilities. This led to the introduction of the Price-Anderson Act in 1957, which was "an implicit admission that nuclear power provided risks that producers were unwilling to assume without federal backing". Nuclear reactor accidents continued into the 1960s with a small test reactor exploding at the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One in Idaho Falls in January 1961 resulting in three deaths which were the first fatalities in the history of U.S. nuclear reactor operations. There was also a partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan in 1966. The large size of nuclear reactors
Boiling water reactor If the core is uncovered for too long, fuel failure can occur; for the purpose of design, fuel failure is assumed to occur when the temperature of the uncovered fuel reaches a critical temperature (1100 °C, 2200 °F). BWR designs incorporate failsafe protection systems to rapidly cool and make safe the uncovered fuel prior to it reaching this temperature; these failsafe systems are known as the Emergency Core Cooling System. The ECCS is designed to rapidly flood the reactor pressure vessel, spray water on the core itself, and sufficiently cool the reactor fuel in this event. However, like any system,