22-09-1980: Pump failure causes accidental release of radioactive water at La Hague reprocessing plant (France)

6-01-1981: Accident at La Hague reprocessing plant (France)

1-10-1983: Technical failure and human error cause accident at Blayas nuclear power plant(France)

19-08-1986: Flooding at the Cattenom nuclear power plant (France)

28-04-1988: Release of 5000 Curies of tritium gas from the Bruyere le Chatel military nuclear complex (France)

1-04-1989: Control rod failure at Gravelines nuclear power plant (France)

28-01-1990: Pump failure during a shut-down at Gravelines nuclear power plant (France)

26-05-1990: During refuelling, five cubic meters of radioactive water spilled at the Fessenheim nuclear power plant (France)

16-09-1990: Superphenix Fast Breeder Reactor is closed down due to technical failures (France)

4-12-1990: 2 workers irradiated during refuelling at Blayais nuclear power plant (France)

1-06-1991: Failure of core cooling system at Belleville nuclear power plant (France)

22-07-1992: Two workers contaminated at Dampierre nuclear power plant (France)

20-01-1993: Technical failure at Paluel causes subcooling accident (France)

22-10-1993: Instrumentation and Control failure at Saint Alban nuclear power plant (France)

28 March 1979
A major accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. At 4:00 a.m. a series of human and mechanical failures nearly triggered a nuclear disaster. By 8:00 a.m., after cooling water was lost and temperatures soared above 5,000 degrees, the top half of the reactor’s 150-ton core collapsed and melted. Contaminated coolant water escaped into a nearby building, releasing radioactive gasses, leading as many as 200,000 people to flee the region. Despite claims by the nuclear industry that "no one died at Three Mile Island," a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths.

11 February 1981
An Auxiliary Unit Operator, working his first day on the new job without proper training, inadvertently opened a valve which led to the contamination of eight men by 110,000 gallons of radioactive coolant sprayed into the containment building of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Sequoyah I plant in Tennessee.

25 January 1982
A steam generator pipe broke at the Rochester Gas & Electric Company’s Ginna plant near Rochester, New York. Fifteen thousand gallons of radioactive coolant spilled onto the plant floor, and small amounts of radioactive steam escaped into the air.

15-16 January 1983
Nearly 208,000 gallons of water with low-level radioactive contamination was accidentally dumped into the Tennesee River at the Browns Ferry power plant.

1988
It was reported that there were 2,810 accidents in U.S. commercial nuclear power plants in 1987, down slightly from the 2,836 accidents reported in 1986, according to a report issued by the Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen, Inc.

25 February 1993A catastrophe at the Salem 1 reactor in New Jersey was averted by just 90 seconds when the plant was shut down manually, following the failure of automatic shutdown systems to act properly. The same automatic systems had failed to respond in an incident three days before, and other problems plagued this plant as well, such as a 3,000 gallon leak of radioactive water in June 1981 at the Salem 2 reactor, a 23,000 gallon leak of "mildly" radioactive water (which splashed onto 16 workers) in February 1982, and radioactive gas leaks in March 1981 and September 1982 from Salem 1.

28 May 1993
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a warning to the operators of 34 nuclear reactors around the country that the instruments used to measure levels of water in the reactor could give false readings during routine shutdowns and fail to detect important leaks. The problem was first bought to light by an engineer at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut who had been harassed for raising safety questions. The flawed instruments at boiling-water reactors designed by General Electric utilize pipes which were prone to being blocked by gas bubbles; a failure to detect falling water levels could have resulted, potentially leading to a meltdown.