> 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.
