Nuclear meltdown of fission product radioactivity, by simple convection. The second test, deliberate shut-off of the secondary coolant loop that supplies the generators, caused the primary circuit to undergo the same safe shutdown. This test simulated the case of a water-cooled reactor losing its steam turbine circuit, perhaps by a leak. This is a list of the major reactor failures in which meltdown played a role: The China syndrome (loss-of-coolant accident) is a hypothetical nuclear reactor operations accident characterized by the severe meltdown of the core components of the reactor, which then burn through the containment vessel and the housing building, then
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