I believe that it is true that nobody has died from acute radiation exposure at a civilian US nuclear power facility. There are still fatal industrial accidents at nuclear facilities from more mundane causes, like accidentally falling equipment:
The reason I bring this up is because the "deaths per terawatt hour" comparisons often used by nuclear proponents omit non-radiation fatal accidents in the accounting for nuclear but include those accidents for renewables. See e.g.
It says that US nuclear has a mortality rate of 0.1 deaths per 1000 terawatt hours. Since US nuclear power generates about 800 TWh per year, that implies a fatality rate of about once every 12 years across the whole US fleet. But as shown above the Surry Nuclear Power Plant alone has had 6 workers die from accidents (though none involved radiation).
Nuclear power is very safe in any case; the real menace is combustion-based energy sources. It's just going too far to say that "not a single person died" from US nuclear power. Job site deaths from crushing, burns, falls from high places, etc. are still deaths. That modest number of accidental deaths would be a rounding error for coal, but it really matters at the low end with nuclear and renewables, precisely because the indirect pollution deaths are so much lower for non-combustion electricity sources.
We all know how enthusiastic governments are to admit fault, there are probably many more.
One I'm familiar with in the US:
"The Sodium Reactor Experiment-SRE was an experimental nuclear reactor that operated at the site from 1957 to 1964 and was the first commercial power plant in the world to experience a core meltdown.
There was a decades-long cover-up of the incident by the U.S. Department of Energy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory#...
nickik's claim was that no one has died in the US from civilian nuclear. Your links are for the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a military experimental research facility.
If there have been any deaths from civilian nuclear, I would like that information to consider.
And lets remember that this was a Soviet design build as a technology to have reactor for nuclear weapons (or at least dual use).
Fukushima is the worst thing ever happened in terms of actual western civilian reactors and not a single person died from radiation.
Not a single person died in the US from civilian nuclear. It is the safest energy technology in terms of actual data.
So yes, it should be saver, but comparatively it is saver then everything else.