List of nuclear and radiation fatalities by country

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

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

Costa Rica

• 1996 – Radiotherapy accident in Costa Rica. Thirteen fatalities and 114 other patients received an overdose of radiation.[3]

Estonia

• October, 1994 - Theft of radioactive material in Tammiku. The accident resulted in the death of one person (and death of one dog) and injury to a number of others.[4]

Greenland

• January 21, 1968 – Thule accident.[5]

India

• April 2010 – Mayapuri radiological accident. One fatality.[6]

Japan

• March 1, 1954 – Daigo Fukuryū Maru, one fatality. A Japanese tuna fishing boat with a crew of 23 men which was contaminated by nuclear fallout from the United States Castle Bravo thermonuclear weapon test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, due to miscalculation of the bomb's explosive yield.
• 1965 Philippine Sea A-4 crash – where a Skyhawk attack aircraft with a nuclear weapon in US-occupied Okinawa fell into the sea. The pilot, the aircraft, and the B43 nuclear bomb were never recovered.[7] It was not until the 1980s that the Pentagon revealed the loss of the one-megaton bomb.[8]
• September 30, 1999 – Tokaimura nuclear accident, nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, two fatalities.[9]
• August 9, 2004 – Mihama Nuclear Power Plant accident. Hot water and steam leaked from a broken pipe. The accident was the worst nuclear disaster of Japan up until that time, excluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Five fatalities.[9]

Mexico

• 1962 – Radiation accident in Mexico City, four fatalities.

Morocco

• March 1984 – Radiation accident in Morocco, eight fatalities.[10] 　

Panama

• August 2000 to March 2001 – Instituto Oncologico Nacional of Panama; 17 patients receiving treatment for prostate cancer and cancer of the cervix received lethal doses of radiation.[11][12]

Soviet Union/Russia

• 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

• January 17, 1966 – 1966 Palomares B-52 crash.[18]
• December 1990 – Radiotherapy accident in Zaragoza. Eleven fatalities and 27 other patients were injured.[19]
• April 4, 2007 – Radioactive leakage in C.N. Ascó I (Ascó - Tarragona).[20]

Thailand

• February 2000 – Three deaths and ten injuries resulted in Samut Prakarn when a radiation-therapy unit was dismantled.[6]

Ukraine

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

• April 26, 1986 – Chernobyl disaster. There is rough agreement that a total of either 31 or 54 people died from blast trauma or acute radiation syndrome (ARS) as a direct result of the disaster.[21][22][23]

United Kingdom

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

United States

• August 21, 1945 – Harry Daghlian died at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
• May 21, 1946 – Louis Slotin died.
• December 30, 1958 – Cecil Kelley criticality accident, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.[27]
• 1961 – (US Army) SL-1 accident resulted in three fatalities.
• 1964- Wood River Jct. Rhode Island. Robert D. Peabody[28] – according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Robert Peabody was the U.S. nuclear industry's first and last fatality due to acute radiation syndrome.
• 1974-1976 – Columbus radiotherapy accident, 10 deaths and 88 injuries.[12][29]
• 1980 – Houston radiotherapy accident, 7 deaths.[12][29]
• 1981 – Douglas Crofut died.

See also

• Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents
• Nuclear and radiation accidents
• Nuclear power accidents by country
• Nevada Test Site
• Radium Girls
• Semipalatinsk Test Site

References

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

External links

• The Worst Nuclear Disasters TIME magazine
• U.S. Nuclear Accidents Compiled by allen lutins
• [1] World Nuclear