@adamd By the way I watched Three Mile Island. Now I'm not sure about nuclear power plants... My sister and her family live near the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant (and the Darlington ... don't know if they are the same)... and we are planning to move closer to them in the near future... yikes... IDK haha @publius Scary stuff
How many nuclear accidents are you aware of? How many people were hurt? Not many.
A lot of additional functionality has been added to the control and instrumentation for reactors as a result of lessons learnt from 3 Mile Island. There are dedicated sets of instrumentation for pre/post accident monitoring which helps inform the operator about the state of the plant.
For a nice description of the events leading up to and after the incident.
There has been one accident at a civil nuclear power reactor which resulted in deaths due to dispersion of radioactivity. And even at Chernobyl, most of the deaths were (a) among station personnel, and (b) caused by steam or blunt-force trauma.
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has repeatedly revised its estimates of the human health effects of Chernobyl downward, based largely on follow-ups of the "liquidators".
There have of course been non-nuclear accidents at nuclear power stations. At Gundremmingen, Germany, in 1978, two fitters were killed when the stem blew out of a steam valve they were working on. It proved that the packing had been installed backward. The steam was radioactive, but they were dead from impact and burns long before radiation could have affected them.
Such accidents are, however, much less common at nuclear stations than at other steam plants.
Unfortunately, makers of films about atomic energy often care very little for either factual accuracy or human decency.
https://man-and-atom.tumblr.com/post/687375211680710656/meltdown