Two nuclear power plant disasters from the Cold War live in our collective memory—Chernobyl in 1989 and Three Mile Island in 1979. There was also Fukushima more recently but that wasn’t an issue that rose from human error, quite the contrary, it was an exhibition of human courage when Japanese elderly volunteered to be the cleanup crew. Although the Three Mile Island disaster was caused technical malfunction and human error like at Chernobyl, nobody died.
Unit 2 generator was the scene of the country’s worst commercial nuclear accident. Radiation was released and part of the actor’s core was damaged, but Unit 1 generator kept running until 2019. Thousands of residents were evacuated and the incident sparked anti-nuclear protest at the tail end of the counterculture movement, but it took until Chernobyl to really dampen reactor construction.
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