Chernobyl Compared With The Three Mile Island Accident
Three Mile Island-2 was an accident of a completely different type from Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a human-caused power excursion causing a steam explosion resulting in a graphite fire, uncontained, which lofted radioactive smoke high into the atmosphere; TMI was a slow, undetected leak that lowered the water level around the nuclear fuel, resulting in over a third of it shattering when refilled rapidly with coolant. Unlike Chernobyl, TMI-2's reactor vessel did not fail and contained almost all of the radioactive material. Containment at TMI did not fail. A small quantity of radioactive gases from the leak were vented into the atmosphere through specially designed filters under operator control. A government report concluded that the accident caused no increase in cancer rates for local residents.
Read more about this topic: Chernobyl Compared To Other Radioactivity Releases
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