[duskwuff]

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them.

The Tokaimura incident (Japan, 1999) comes to mind as a counterexample.

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TOAC_web.pdf

TL;DR: enriched uranium solution was poured into a tank with improper geometry and reached criticality; three workers were severely irradiated, and two of them subsequently died.

[chasil]

I remember someone from the Manhattan Project that suffered the same fate. Is that "commercial nuclear history?"

This article on Douglas Crofut [died 1981] implies that there were several.

"His death was the first of its kind in the United States since the 1940s, when radiation deaths occurred during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crofut

It turns out that there were two Manhattan Project fatalities, one in 1945, and one in 1946.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

[kmoser]

It's a technicality, but I think those events don't qualify as both "accident" and "commercial." The Manhattan Project was a government project, not a commercial enterprise. Crofut's exposure seems to have been an attempted suicide, not an accident.

I realize the article is about nuclear plants and accidental exposure to radiation, but it conveniently omits the fact that thousands of people died from radiation when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked. Those bombings were no accident, of course, but from the point of view of the victims, what's the difference? They were subject to forces beyond their control, just like any other accident.

[duskwuff]

"First of its kind since the 1940s" still seems a little questionable given the Cecil Kelley incident (Los Alamos, 1958).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Kelley_criticality_accid...

Interestingly, both the Tokaimura and Kelley incidents involved a radioactive solution in an unfavorable geometry.

[lstodd]

It was contained and therefore not worth mentioning. Someone got blown up by the tyre he was pumping up, no sweat.

What's missing is the Mayak accident / Kyshtym disaster, 1957.

It also did not result in any world-ending stuff. People died, is all.

[zer00eyz]

> Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history...

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/inadequate-con...

Some of the more notable such accidents include:

In China in 1992, a cobalt-60 source was lost and picked up by an unsuspecting individual. Three persons in the family died of resulting overexposure;

In Georgia in 1997, a group of border frontier guards became ill and showed signs of radiation-induced skin disease. Eleven servicemen had to be transferred to specialized hospitals in France and Germany. The cause of the exposures was found to be several abandoned caesium-37 and a cobalt-60 sources of varying activities, abandoned in a former military barracks that had been under the control of the former Soviet Union;

In Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, two cobalt-60 sources in their shipping containers were sold as scrap metal and ten persons were inadvertently exposed to radiation and had to be treated for acute radiation syndrome;

In Peru in 1999, a worker put an iridium-192 industrial source in his pocket and suffered severe radiation burns;

The most serious of these accidents occurred in the south-central Brazilian city of Goiânia in September of 1987. he Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission sent in a team and they discovered that over 240 persons were contaminated with caesium-137, four of whom later died.

These things should be somewhat easy to keep under control, yet we cant. There are currently 90,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA. We keep hearing that the cost of nuclear is cheaper than gas... because we just leave the problem sitting on site. The moment that you either dig the massive hole in the ground to dump this, or build a fuel reprocessing site(s) that economic value pretty much disappears. And fule reprocessing doesn't get rid of the problematic parts, only concentrates them, you still need a hole.