Located in Pennsylvania, the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor had a partial meltdown in 1979. This occurred due to a failure that prevented water from reaching the generators to cool the reactor core. Nobody ended up injured or harmed, though this meltdown scared the US into rethinking its emergency response planning.

On March 11, 2011, Japan experienced an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0. This earthquake create a large tsunami that took the lives of almost 20 thousand people. After the Tsunami, the reactor cooling circuits were lost. This resulted in the cores of units 1, 2, and 3 to overheat and melt most of the nuclear fuel inside of the core. Though there have been no deaths directly caused by the nuclear accident, three employees died from the earthquake and tsunami.

In 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, a combination of reactor design, control problems, and a disregard of safety procedures contributed to the worst nuclear accident in our history. A chain reaction in the core caused several explosions that created a large fireball, releasing large amounts of radioactive material into the air. To this day, Chernobyl is still uninhabitable by life, though people with permits can go there for a limited amount of time.