The Nuclear Files

West Valley’s reprocessing plant ran about six years, and demolishing its main building took nearly three. Its vitrified waste sits on a storage pad with no disposal facility, and the final cleanup decision is still open, with 2010 estimates from $0.5 billion more to $8.2 billion.

A tiny cesium-137 capsule lost in a quarry ended up inside an apartment wall in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Residents fell ill and died for years, and accounts still disagree on how many deaths and illnesses the source caused.

Hanford’s 1949 Green Run released iodine-131 from fuel cooled only 16 days, yet who proposed and approved the experiment remains publicly unresolved.

A radiotherapy source melted in a Spanish steel mill in 1998, and the mill’s own detectors missed it. Air filters in Switzerland, France and Italy caught the cesium first, setting off a hunt for its origin.

A plutonium-238 generator left on Nanda Devi in 1965 was never found, at the head of a watershed that feeds the Ganges. The records show a real loss, a 1978 scare and decades of testing with no documented release.

Petitioners in 2015 and an executive order in 2026 both pushed the NRC to abandon the linear no-threshold model. A proposed rule would now drop ALARA, yet the low-dose end of the risk curve is still drawn the same way.

When Cosmos 954 broke apart over northern Canada in 1978, a satellite failure became a radioactive cleanup and a dispute over who should pay.