Smaller accidents occurred in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s: Wikipedia has an interesting list of civilian nuclear accidents. For example, two Japanese workers died after a 1999 incident.
The International Atomic Agency has a broader list of accident studies: Publications on Accident Response.
This is in reference to Cecil’s column, The China (Flats) Syndrome: Was there a reactor meltdown in Southern California? Consider this elaboration on Cecil’s closing remarks:
True, but the original column was about meltdowns.
Accidents were tangetal to the main issue.
Still far less than those 5000 coal workers who die every YEAR however…
-XT
I was going to question xtisme’s numbers, thinking only of accidents, until I remembered my dad, many moons ago, was a Black Lung expert with the SSA. Yeah, sounds about right. 
Actually the coal numbers are a lot worse: I suspect that xtisme was referring to Cecil’s claim of 5000 Chinese coal miners who die each year. This probably doesn’t include the effects of pollution, global warming, etc.
Bosda: It’s a little tangential, but the questioner referred to both accidents and meltdowns. Actually though, I think Cecil pared the issue down nicely.
Nuclear power is difficult to get one’s head around: we’re addressing an expensive industrial process that has a very-very small chance of something really-really dreadful happening. Ah well, pick your poison I guess.
Yeah, we have to remember all those intentional meltdowns.
There were intentional melt downs, or at least experiments designed to see what happened when you melted fuel. I assume Cecil didn’t mention these because they were trying for this.
See Proving the Principle for the history of the Idaho National Laboratory (it’s had a few name changes over the years) where much of the nuclear reactor research was done in the early years.
Of special note is Chapter 14-Imagining the Worst which covers the EBR-1 melted core (which, while technically unplanned, was not at all unforeseen). This chapter also covers TREAT tests where fuel types were pushed to their limits to see what would happen when a ‘transient’ condition exists.
Nuclear ‘accidents’ are a much broader category than ‘meltdowns’ which, as Cecil noted, only covers a molten core. For the first nuclear reactor fatality in the US read Chapter 15-The SL-1 Reactor
*Note: all the above links are in pdf format
On thing I was unclear on after reading the article was how many, if any, of those meltdowns met the classic super-scary criteria of “melted through the containment vessel and hit the water table.” I know Three Mile Island didn’t–it just melted the core. Has that ever actually happened?
According to this Wikipedia entry, no.
Well yes, but there’s no mention of how many uranium workers die every year. And nuclear power produces hugely less of the world’s power than coal does; you’d have to compare it on a per-megawatt basis to be fair.
Do you have a world wide figure on the number of uranium miners killed per year? When I google I get a huge number…but they are killed from natural radon in the environment (like 20k per year). There is a brief blurb about 81 miners deaths in Canada per year, and something about 3000 per century killed from lung cancer while mining…but nothing precise. If you have better figures then we can compare.
-XT
No, I have no figures. I was just pointing out that counting a source of deaths on one side and not the other does not produce a fair comparison of the dangers of each. I would expect uranium to come out ahead, mind you, simply because you have to mine so much less of it to generate a megawatt.
I wanted to come in and point out that these two idiots earned their Darwin Awards while not working on a power plant. Well, not on a planned power plant. While anyone willing to guesstimate the volume of fissile materiel to add to a container is no one that I am going to feel very sympathetic towards, the fact that they did bring their transportation container critical makes it something of a moot point. They weren’t supposed to be working on a power plant, but they sure made one. And if two people who should know better were willing to go by guesstimate measurements with that kind of potential penalty for getting things wrong it doesn’t give one a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about their comrades operating the planned reactors.
BTW, Threadkiller, by what measure is it claimed that SL-1 wasn’t a meltdown? The core was breached, melted and otherwise ruined. It wasn’t turned into the pile of radioactive modern art that TMI was, but the core wasn’t intact after that fiasco, either. Granted a more traditional meltdown is caused by a chronic build-up of heat in the core that’s not being removed by the cooling medium and the SL-1 accident was effectively instantaneous on any human scale but I’d think that the defining characteristic is whether the core is still intact - keeping the fissionable material sealed in the fuel matrix - not the size of the molten puddle created.
My neighbor was involved in this incident. He said it was a suicide. Unfortunately, two innocent men also died.
Do you mean that one man committed suicide by manually pulling the rod? Killing his two co-workers? Wow.