Nearly 60 years after a radiation-leaking reactor was removed from a US Army base on the Greenland ice sheet, the military is exploring portable nuclear reactors again.
A visitor to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum views a photo of the aftermath of the 1945 bombing.
Carl Court/Getty Images
Wild horses native to the steppes of Asia live now in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (Ukraine), with an expanding population, 34 years after the nuclear accident.
Miners were among the many people the USSR deployed after the disaster.
Liam Daniel/HBO
Most of the time, these operations were not urgent – unlike the one following this disaster that summoned some 600,000 people to the site of the worst nuclear accident of all time.
The memorial to the Chernobyl disaster in front of the reactor, now encased in its new containment shield.
Jorge Franganillo
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima demonstrated the difficulty of managing a disaster at a nuclear power plant. What is the situation in France?
Cleanup crew search for radioactive debris.
U.S. Air Force
In what came to be known as the Thule incident, an American bomber crashed in Greenland, spreading radioactive wreckage across 3 square miles of a frozen fjord. Denmark was not happy.
Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century, they can only be sustainable if eco-friendliness is one of their core features.
In part two of our podcast on rebooting, we explore what would happen if humanity was wiped out, take a look at a political comeback in France, and get a taste of a revamped US institution.
Radiation exposure as a child can increase cancer risk later in life. But by how much?
Gleb Garanich/Reuters
Chernobyl is already responsible for up to 5,000 cases of cancer in Europe.
After one reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caught fire and exploded in 1986, the whole site was encased in a concrete sarcophagus.
Vladimir Repik/Reuters
The meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 exposed 572 million people to radiation. No other nuclear accident holds a candle to that level of public health impact.
White storks on road near Chernobyl, Ukraine. Many parts of the Chernobyl region have low radioactivity levels and serve as refuges for plants and animals.
Tim Mousseau
How do we measure long-term impacts of nuclear accidents? Studies at Chernobyl and Fukushima show that radiation has harmed animals, birds and insects and reduced biodiversity at both sites.
Remediation will never get radiation to zero in the area affected by the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. Rather than safety, the conversation should focus on acceptable risk.
Radioactively contaminated territory around the Mayak nuclear facility in Russia.
Nikulina/Slapovskaya/Heinrich Boell Foundation Moscow