On September 30, 1999 a severe accident happened at a nuclear fuel factory run by JCO, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Metals and Mining in the village of Tokaimura, 130 km northeast of Tokyo. Three workers were exposed to high levels of radiation. Hisashi Ouchi, 35, died on December 21, 1999. His colleague Masato Shinohara, 40, survived until April 27.

The Tokaimura accident is the third most serious accident in the history of nuclear power, after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and the 1979 Three Miles Island accident. Unlike these other cases, the Tokaimura accident did not involve a nuclear power station but a nuclear fuel factory where no nuclear chain reaction should ever happen, yet due to gross negligence it did. Since there was no mechanical system to interrupt the reaction it was sustained for 17-20 hours. For several days the ventilation system in the factory was left running, blowing contaminated air from the inside of the building into the surrounding village.

The accident happened when workers preparing nuclear fuels mixed uranium oxide with nitric acid using a stainless steel container instead of a mixing apparatus. This shortcut was described in an illegal operating manual drafted by the company. The manual had never been approved by the supervising ministry, as was legally required. The procedure violated some of the most basic safety requirements that were well known in the nuclear industries since the early 1940s. By circumventing the mixing apparatus an excessive amount of nuclear fuel could be inserted at any one time, which lead to a nuclear chain reaction. Most likely the illegal shortcut was an attempt to save costs in order to be more competitive with foreign fuel suppliers. The shortcut had been used for seven or eight years before the accident happened. The three workers were performing this task for the first time and were wearing t-shirts instead of protective clothing and the required film badges to measure radioactive exposure.

The company did not have any emergency plans in place for handling such criticality accidents. A foreign specialist said the plant "had the safety standards of a bakery and not a nuclear facility." The Science and Technology Agency later revoked the operating license of the plant owner. Critics pointed out nuclear facilities such as this fuel factory are rarely ever checked once they receive the initial operating license.

Families living near the plant were temporarily evacuated and 300,000 people were asked to stay indoors for more than a day. Later neighbours and employees were tested for radioactive contamination. 63 people were identified as having been exposed, amongst them 14 workers of JCO (who poured boron into the reaction vessel to help put out the nuclear chain reaction) and the two victims who later died.

The Tokaimura accident was the third serious nuclear accident in four years. In 1996 a coolant leak and subsequent fire caused an emergency shutdown of the plutonium-fuelled reactor Monju. The following year a fire and explosion in a nuclear waste processing facility in Tokaimura exposed 35 people to radiation.

The 2006 Java earthquake occurred at 05:54 local time on 27 May 2006 (22:54 GMT 26 May), in the Indian Ocean around 25 km (15 miles) south-southwest of the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, on the southern side of the island of Java (8.007° S 110.286° E), 17.1 km below the seabed, according to the U.S. Geological Survey; Jakarta's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency determined the epicentre to be about 37 km south of Yogyakarta, 33 km below the seabed. The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.3. Two aftershocks, measured at 4.8 and 4.6, occurred between 4 and 6 hours later.

According to CNN, there have been more than 5,100 deaths so far while more than 6,500 people have been injured to various degrees, and 100,000 left homeless. 2,091 of those deaths and more than 1,892 injuries in the area of Bantul. BBC News reports quotes a Social Affairs Ministry official as saying that the number of dead stood at 4,983. Similar numbers have been provided by Le Monde and Agence France Press. Around five million people live within 50 km of the epicentre.

Coastal residents fled inland in fear of a tsunami, but such an event did not transpire since the magnitude was insufficient for the quake to be tsunamigenic. Nearby Borobudur, an ancient Buddhist stupa, apparently survived completely intact.

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On August 6, 1945 the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by Enola Gay, a U.S. Air Force B-29 bomber which was altered specifically to hold the bomb, killing an estimated 80,000 people and heavily damaging 80% of the city. In the following months, an estimated 60,000 more people died from injuries or radiation poisoning. Since 1945, several thousand more hibakusha have died of illnesses caused by the bomb. It was the second such device to be detonated (the first being the successful test at the Manhattan Project's desert test site, in New Mexico), and the first ever to be used in military action. The American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably major factors leading to the surrender of the Japanese government six days after the latter attack.

After the nuclear attack, Hiroshima was rebuilt as a “peace memorial city”, and the closest surviving building to the location of the bomb's detonation was designated the "Atomic Bomb Dome," a part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The city government continues to advocate the abolition of nuclear weapons, and has advocated more broadly for world peace. They have written a letter of protest every time a nuclear weapon has been detonated anywhere in the world since 1968.

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The Chernobyl disaster occurred at 01:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine. It is regarded as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power. Because there was no containment building, a plume of radioactive fallout drifted over parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and eastern North America. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. About 60% of the radioactive fallout landed in Belarus according to official post-Soviet data. According to the 2006 TORCH report, half of the radioactive fallout landed outside those three Soviet republics. The disaster released as much as 300 times more radioactive fallout than the atomic bomb of Hiroshima.

The accident raised concerns about the safety of the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for a number of years, while forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive. The now-independent countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with continuing and substantial decontamination and health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. It is difficult to tally accurately the number of deaths caused by the events at Chernobyl, as Soviet-era cover-up made it difficult to track down victims. Lists were incomplete, and Soviet authorities later forbade doctors to cite "radiation" on death certificates. Most of the expected long-term fatalities, especially those from cancer, have not yet actually occurred, and will be difficult to attribute specifically to the accident. Estimates and figures vary widely. A 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer), and estimated that as many as 9,000 people, among the approximately 6.6 million most highly exposed, will die from some form of cancer (one of the induced diseases). For its part, Greenpeace estimates a total death toll of 93,000 but cites in their report “The most recently published figures indicate that in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine alone the accident could have resulted in an estimated 200,000 additional deaths in the period between 1990 and 2004.”

The accident occurred in the TMI-2 reactor (the plant had two reactors; TMI-1 was down for refueling at the time) and had a number of primary causes, related both to technical malfunction and human error. It began when the plant's main feedwater pumps in the secondary non-nuclear cooling system failed at about 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979. This failure was due to either a mechanical or electrical failure in the condensation system and caused a reduction in feedwater flow which prevented the steam generators from removing heat. The auxiliary (backup) feedwater system had been inadvertently left valved-out after an earlier maintenance activity. First the turbine, then the nuclear reactor automatically shut down. Immediately, the pressure in the primary system (the nuclear portion of the plant) began to increase. In order to prevent that pressure from becoming excessive, the pressurizer relief valve (a valve located at the top of the pressurizer) opened. The valve should have re-closed when the pressure decreased by a small amount, but it did not. The only signals available to the operators showed the valve as being closed, but in fact only the signal to close the valve was sent; the system did not check that the valve was actually closed. The "positive feedback" lamp in the control room indicating the true position of the valve (a Pressure Operated Relief Valve, or PORV) was eliminated in original construction to save time and has been backfitted to all other similar plants. As a result of this design error, the valve remained open and caused the pressure to continue to decrease in the system.

It should be noted that the operators and emergency operating procedures (EOPs) did not recognize the accident as a classic LOCA (Loss of Coolant Accident) since they had no dependable instrumentation to indicate the loss of primary water or non-ambiguous reactor level indication (see Aftermath).

Meanwhile, another problem appeared elsewhere in the plant with the emergency feedwater system (the backup to the main feedwater). It had been tested 42 hours prior to the accident. As part of the test, a valve is closed and then reopened at the end of the test. But this time, through either an administrative or human error, the valve was not reopened. This prevented the emergency feedwater system from functioning during the accident. The valve was discovered closed about eight minutes into the accident. Once it was reopened, the emergency feedwater system began to work correctly, allowing cooling water to flow into the steam generators.

As the system pressure in the primary system continued to decrease, voids (areas where there is no water present) began to form in portions of the system other than the pressurizer. Because of these voids, the water in the system was redistributed and the pressurizer still had water available. The turbulence of this water blew out the stuck-open valve and caused the level indicator to think the pressurizer was full. Thus the level indicator, which tells the operator the amount of coolant capable of heat removal, incorrectly indicated the system was full of water. Therefore, the operator stopped adding water — by turning off the Emergency Core Cooling pumps, which had automatically come on. He was unaware that, because of the stuck valve, the indicator could, and in this instance did, provide false readings.

After almost eighty minutes of slow temperature rise, the primary loop pumps began to cavitate as steam, rather than water, began to pass through them. The pumps were shut down, and it was believed that natural circulation would continue the water movement. Steam in the system locked the primary loop, and as the water stopped circulating it was converted to steam in increasing amounts. About 130 minutes after the first malfunction, the top of the reactor core was exposed and the heat and steam drove a reaction involving hydrogen and radioactive gases with the zirconium nuclear control rod cladding. The quench tank (collecting the discharge from the PORV) overfilled, its relief diaphragm ruptured, and radioactive coolant began to leak out into the general containment building. At 6 a.m. there was a shift change in the control room. A new arrival noticed that the temperature in the holding tanks was excessive and used a backup valve to shut off the coolant venting, but around 950 m³ (250,000 US gallons) of coolant had already leaked from the primary loop. It was not until 165 minutes after the start of the problem that radiation alarms activated as contaminated water reached detectors — by that time the radiation levels in the primary coolant water were around 300 times expected levels, and the plant was seriously contaminated.

At 7:00 AM a "Site Area Emergency" was declared. At 7:24 AM the incident was upgraded to a "General Emergency". Harrisburg radio station WKBO announced a problem with the plant at 8:25 AM. The Associated Press announced the general emergency at 9:00 AM.

It was still not clear to the control room that the primary loop water levels were low and that over half of the core was exposed (a LOCA). A group of workers took manual readings from the thermocouples and obtained a sample of primary loop water. Around seven hours into the emergency, new water was pumped into the primary loop. The backup relief valve was opened to reduce pressure. At around nine hours the hydrogen within the reactor building ignited and burned, but this was largely unnoticed. After almost sixteen hours the primary loop pumps were turned back on and the core temperature began to fall. A large part of the core had melted, and the system was still dangerously radioactive. Over the next week the steam and hydrogen were removed from the reactor using a recombiner and, more controversially, by venting straight to the atmosphere. It is estimated that a maximum of 13 million curies (480 petabecquerels) of radioactive noble gases were released by the event, though very little of the hazardous iodine-131 was released.

The molten fuel did not break through in a "China Syndrome". "Despite melting of about one-third of the fuel, the reactor vessel itself maintained its integrity and contained the damaged fuel."

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The Bhopal Disaster of 1984 is claimed by many as the worst industrial disaster in history. It was caused by the accidental release of 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) from a Union Carbide India, Limited (UCIL, now known as Eveready Industries India, Limited) pesticide plant located in the heart of the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

In the early hours of December 3, 1984, a holding tank with stored MIC overheated and released toxic heavier-than-air MIC gas, which rolled along the ground through the surrounding streets killing thousands outright. The transportation system in the city collapsed and many people were trampled trying to escape. The gases also injured anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 people, at least 15,000 of whom later died.

The majority of deaths and serious injuries were related to pulmonary edema, but the gas caused a wide variety of other ailments. Signs and symptoms of methyl isocyanate normally include cough, dyspnea, chest pain, lacrimation, eyelid edema, and unconsciousness. These effects might progress over the next 24 to 72 hours to include acute lung injury, cardiac arrest, and death. Because of the hypothesized reactions that took place within the storage tank and in the surrounding atmosphere, it is thought that apart from MIC, phosgene, and hydrogen cyanide along with other poisonous gases all played a significant role in this disaster.

Information on the exact chemical mixture was never provided by the company, but blood and viscera of some victims showed cherry-red color characteristic in acute cyanide poisoning. A series of studies made five years later showed that many of the survivors were still suffering from one or several of the following ailments: partial or complete blindness, gastrointestinal disorders, impaired immune systems, post traumatic stress disorders, and menstrual problems in women. A rise in spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and offspring with genetic defects was also noted. In addition, a BBC investigation conducted in November 2004 confirmed that contamination is still present.

Mayak is the name of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant between the towns of Kasli and Kyshtym (also transliterated Kishtym or Kishtim) 150 km northwest of Chelyabinsk in Russia. The plant is in the Ozersk central administrative territorial unit, formerly known as Chelyabinsk-40, later as Chelyabinsk-65, and part of the Chelyabinsk Oblast.

Working conditions at Mayak resulted in severe health hazards and many accidents [2].The most notable accident occurred on 29 September 1957, when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion having a force estimated at about 75 tons of TNT (310 gigajoules), which released some 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radiation. See list of military nuclear accidents and [3]. Subsequently, at least 200 people died of radiation sickness, 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and 470,000 people were exposed to radiation. People "grew hysterical with fear with the incidence of unknown 'mysterious' diseases breaking out. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." (Pollock 1978: 9) "Hundreds of square miles were left barren and unusable for decades and maybe centuries. Hundreds of people died, thousands were injured and surrounding areas were evacuated." (Zhores Medvedev, The Australian, 9.12.1976). This nuclear accident, the Soviet Union's worst other than Chernobyl, is categorised as a level 6 "serious accident" on the 7 point International Nuclear Events Scale.

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Mount Vesuvius (Italian: Monte Vesuvio, also Somma-Vesuvius or Somma-Vesuvio, Latin: Mons Vesuvius) is a volcano east of Naples, Italy, located at 40°49&#8242;N 14°26&#8242;E. It is the only volcano on the European mainland to have erupted within the last hundred years, although it is not currently erupting. The only other two such volcanoes in Italy are located on islands.

Vesuvius is situated on the coast of the Bay of Naples, about nine kilometres (six miles) to the east of the city and a short distance inland from the shore. It forms a conspicuous feature in the beautiful landscape presented by that bay, when viewed from the sea, with the city in the foreground. The mountain is notorious for its destruction of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE. It has erupted many times since and is today regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000[people now living close to it coupled with its tendency towards explosive eruptions.

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On May 6, 1937, at 18:25 (6:25 PM local time) the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire while approaching a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The flames appeared near the tail and within 37 seconds engulfed the ship. Of the 97 people on board 35 were killed (13 were passengers and 22 were crew). One member of the ground crew also died.

On March 23, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez departed from the Valdez oil terminal in Valdez, Alaska (on its 28th voyage), heading south through Prince William Sound, with a full load (52 million gallons) of oil. Captain Joseph Hazelwood radioed to the Coast Guard station that he would be changing course in order to avoid some growlers, small icebergs which had drifted into the sound from the Columbia Glacier. The captain received permission to move into the northbound lane. Before retiring to his cabin, Captain Hazelwood instructed his third mate Gregory Cousins to "start coming back into the lanes" once the ship was abeam Busby Island Light, some 2 minutes ahead.

Although Cousins did give the instructions to the helmsman, a relapsed alcoholic, to steer the vessel to the right, the vessel was not turning sharply enough and at 12:04 a.m. on March 24, the vessel hit Bligh Reef. It is not known whether Cousins gave the orders too late or the helmsman did not follow instructions properly.

The spilled oil affected 1,900 km of Alaskan coastline. Although Exxon's initial report of 10.8 million gallons (40,900 m³) of oil spilled has been widely accepted, other sources estimate the spill at 35 million gallons (110,000 m³)

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Benxihu (Honkeiko) Colliery (&#26412;&#28330;&#28246;&#23186;&#31014;), located at Benxi, Liaoning, China, was first mined in 1905, under the control of Japanese. It was the location of the worst coal mining disaster in the world. On April 26, 1942, a coal-dust explosion occurred, killed 1,549, 34% of all the miners working at that day.

Around midday on Saturday 10 July 1976, an explosion occurred in a TCP (2,4,5-trichlorophenol) reactor of the ICMESA chemical plant on the outskirts of Meda, a small town about 20 kilometres north of Milan, Italy.1 A toxic cloud containing TCDD (2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin), then widely believed to be one of the most toxic man-made chemicals, was accidentally released into the atmosphere. The dioxin cloud contaminated a densely populated area about six kilometres long and one kilometre wide, lying downwind from the site. This event became internationally known as the Seveso disaster, after the name of a neighbouring municipality that was most severely affected.

Eleven communities in the rolling countryside between Milan and Lake Como were directly involved in the toxic release and its aftermath. The four most impacted municipalities included Seveso (1976 population 17,000), Meda (19,000), Desio (33,000), and Cesano Maderno (34,000). Two other municipalities were subject to postaccident restrictions: Barlassina (6,000) and Bovisio Masciago (11,000). Health monitoring was extended to a further five municipalities. The entire affected area is part of the Brianza, a prosperous district of Lombardy, itself one of the wealthiest and most industrialized regions of Italy. Though originally agricultural, the economy of this area depended on a cluster of small workshops and industries, mainly engaged in manufacturing furniture.

The Seveso disaster had a particularly traumatic effect on exposed local populations because its seriousness was recognized only gradually. The community was divided by rancorous conflicts. People in other countries also experienced much heightened concern about industrial risks and the need for tighter regulation of hazardous chemical installations. In these respects Seveso resembled Bhopal (1984) and Chernobyl (1986), which have both come to be regarded as international symbols of industrial pathology.