Half-Life Histories

In 1946, a P-239 plutonium core scheduled for detonation-by-nuclear-bomb was harmlessly melted down and reintegrated into the United States’ nuclear s...

By the fall of 1986, the emergency crews fighting to contain the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant made it into the basement. They...

At the time, it was the most powerful artificial explosion in human history…but it wasn’t supposed to be. On March 1st, 1954, the United States detona...

At 6 AM on New Year’s Day, 1959, Dr. Clarence Lushbaugh began an autopsy. He was about to open up one Cecil Kelley, and remove eight pounds of his org...

On 13 July 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment...

The grisly details of America's deadly first nuclear disaster, SL-1.

As conditions change at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, radiation rates are rising once again. Are they dangerous, and will they lead to another di...

On 11 March 2011, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant experienced the worst disaster since Chernobyl. And its people...went through an epide...

On September 13, 1987, some men cracked open an abandoned source of cesium-137. What followed was one of the world's worst nuclear accidents.

Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant fell. The radiation in the area began to rise. Is Chernobyl...

When Russia took over Europe's largest nuclear power plant, the public was terrified it would lead to nuclear disaster. How secure are nuclear facilit...

There has only been one recorded death due to an unknown source of radiation. Was it an accident? Was it negligence? Or was it something worse?

The Three Mile Island accident is one of the world's most infamous, but was it more of a communication meltdown than a nuclear one?

On July 19th, 1957, a 2-kiloton nuclear warhead exploded above the heads of five volunteers during “Shot John” of the Operation Plumbbob series of US...

In 1985, a state-of-the-art radiation therapy device called the THERAC-25 started blasting holes through patients' bodies, leading to the world’s firs...

Almost half of the people who worked on John Wayne’s “worst” film – The Conqueror – eventually died of cancer. Was it because the movie was shot downw...

On a snowy day in 2001, three men from Lia, Georgia stumbled across two metal cylinders. The ground was steaming beneath them. It would take the work...

In late 2022, a video of an apparent nuclear accident spread rapidly on Twitter and Tumblr. Was it modern history’s first “viral” nuclear accident? Or...

On August 6th, 1945, the people of Hiroshima, Japan became some of the only humans to ever witness firsthand the awesome and terrible power of an atom...

Fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenhemier and his team of Manhattan Project scientists ushered in the nuclear a...

On November 17th, 1992 a scientist accidentally stuck his hand in an extremely powerful beam of x-rays at a particle accelerator accelerator facility...

In Germany in 1939, the Uranverein, or “uranium club,” was trying to beat Oppenheimer to the bomb. The scientist believed all Germany needed was enoug...

After its discovery by Marie Curie, the radioactive element radium was incorporated into everything as a “cure all.” The most famous was RADITHOR, a r...

Could you see a nuclear explosion on the moon with the naked eye? That was the question posed by the United States military in the 1950s as the cold w...

Between 1980 and 1989, four people between two young families would die of leukemia. The connection? They all lived in the same room in an apartment b...

In Russia in 1997, an unfortunate technician answered the question, “what would have happened if the ‘Demon Core’ was never stopped in 1946?” This epi...

At exactly 6:06PM on July 24th, 1964, a 38-year-old father of nine poured what he thought was 11 liters of solvent into a mixing tank. What followed w...

In 1989, 1990, and 1991, there were three back-to-back fatal irradiator accidents in El Salvador, Israel, and Belarus. This [HALF-LIFE HISTORY] tells...

On September 30, 1999, the Tokaimura nuclear accident became the worst criticality accident in modern nuclear history. At a uranium processing facilit...

On October 10th, 1957, a nuclear reactor fire broke out at Windscale in the UK becoming the first nuclear disaster to directly impact the public. Long...