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List of nuclear and radiation fatalities by country

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The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the worst nuclear accident in 25 years, displaced 50,000 households after radiation leaked into the air, soil and sea.[1]
Deceased Liquidators' portraits used for an anti-nuclear power protest in Geneva.
This image of the SL-1 core served as a reminder of deaths and damage that a nuclear meltdown can cause.

This is a partial list of nuclear and radiation fatalities by country. Not all fatal incidents are included, and not all included incidents were fatal.

This list only reports the proximate confirmed human deaths and does not go into detail about ecological, environmental or long-term effects such as birth defects or permanent loss of habitable land.

Brazil

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  • September 13, 1987 – Goiania accident. Four fatalities and 320 other people received serious radiation contamination.[2]

Costa Rica

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Estonia

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Greenland

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India

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Japan

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Mexico

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Morocco

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Panama

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Soviet Union/Russia

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  • September 29, 1957 – Kyshtym disaster, Mayak nuclear waste storage tank explosion at Chelyabinsk. Two hundred plus fatalities and this figure is a conservative estimate; 270,000 people were exposed to dangerous radiation levels. Over thirty small communities had been removed from Soviet maps between 1958 and 1991.[13] (INES level 6).[14]
  • July 4, 1961 – Soviet submarine K-19 accident. Eight fatalities and more than 30 people were over-exposed to radiation.[15]
  • May 24, 1968 – Soviet submarine K-27 accident. Nine fatalities and 83 people were injured.[12]
  • 5 October 1982 – Lost radiation source, Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR. Five fatalities and 13 injuries.[12]
  • August 10, 1985 – Soviet submarine K-431 accident. Ten fatalities and 49 other people suffered radiation injuries.[16]
  • April 26, 1986 – Chernobyl disaster. See below in the section on Ukraine. In 1986, the Ukrainian SSR was part of the Soviet Union.
  • 1 November 2006 – assassination of Alexander Litvinenko by exposure to Polonium-210.[17]

Spain

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Thailand

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Ukraine

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The abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine with the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the distance.

United Kingdom

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  • October 8, 1957 – Windscale fire ignites plutonium piles and contaminates surrounding dairy farms, 100 to 240 cancer deaths.[24][25][26]

United States

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ Tomoko Yamazaki and Shunichi Ozasa (June 27, 2011). "Fukushima Retiree Leads Anti-Nuclear Shareholders at Tepco Annual Meeting". Bloomberg.
  2. ^ The Radiological Accident in Goiania p. 2.
  3. ^ Medical management of radiation accidents pp. 299 & 303.
  4. ^ https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1053_web.pdf [bare URL PDF]
  5. ^ Thule Accident, January 21, 1968 TIME magazine.
  6. ^ a b Pallava Bagla. "Radiation Accident a 'Wake-Up Call' For India's Scientific Community" Science, Vol. 328, 7 May 2010, p. 679.
  7. ^ Broken Arrows at www.atomicarchive.com. Accessed Aug 24, 2007.
  8. ^ "U.S. Confirms '65 Loss of H-Bomb Near Japanese Islands". The Washington Post. Reuters. May 9, 1989. p. A-27.
  9. ^ a b Benjamin K. Sovacool. A Critical Evaluation of Nuclear Power and Renewable Electricity in Asia, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 40, No. 3, August 2010, p. 399.
  10. ^ Lost Iridium-192 Source
  11. ^ Investigation of an accidental Exposure of radiotherapy patients in Panama - International Atomic Energy Agency
  12. ^ a b c d e Johnston, Robert (September 23, 2007). "Deadliest radiation accidents and other events causing radiation casualties". Database of Radiological Incidents and Related Events.
  13. ^ Samuel Upton Newtan. Nuclear War I and Other Major Nuclear Disasters of the 20th Century 2007, pp. 237–240.
  14. ^ Timeline: Nuclear plant accidents BBC News, 11 July 2006.
  15. ^ Strengthening the Safety of Radiation Sources Archived 2009-03-26 at the Wayback Machine p. 14.
  16. ^ The Worst Nuclear Disasters
  17. ^ "Poison, spies and businessmen: The Litvinenko murder case 15 years on". Deutsche Welle. 2021-11-24. Retrieved 2022-04-14.
  18. ^ Palomares Incident, January 17, 1966 TIME magazine.
  19. ^ Strengthening the Safety of Radiation Sources Archived 2009-03-26 at the Wayback Machine p. 15.
  20. ^ The radioactive leak in Ascó was a hundred times greater than declared. El Pais.
  21. ^ "The impact of Chernobyl's nuclear disaster 33 years later". PBS NewsHour Weekend. April 21, 2019. Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  22. ^ Wellerstein, Alex (April 26, 2016). "The Battles of Chernobyl". The New Yorker. Retrieved May 10, 2019.
  23. ^ Health effects due to radiation from the Chernobyl accident (Annex D of the 2008 UNSCEAR Report) (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-08-04, retrieved 2016-01-11
  24. ^ Black, Richard (18 March 2011). "Fukushima - disaster or distraction?". BBC News. Retrieved 30 June 2020.
  25. ^ Ahlstrom, Dick (8 October 2007). "The unacceptable toll of Britain's nuclear disaster". The Irish Times. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  26. ^ Highfield, Roger (9 October 2007). "Windscale fire: 'We were too busy to panic'". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 15 June 2020. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  27. ^ McInroy, James F. (1995), "A true measure of plutonium exposure: the human tissue analysis program at Los Alamos" (PDF), Los Alamos Science, 23: 235–255
  28. ^ "Father of nine killed in uranium poisoning accident". The North Adams Transcript. 1964-07-27. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  29. ^ a b Ricks, Robert C.; et al. (2000). "REAC/TS Radiation Accident Registry: Update of Accidents in the United States" (PDF). International Radiation Protection Association. p. 6.
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