While I was in my senior year in college (1999) at Brown, there was a fatal accident at a fuel reprocessing facility in Japan. It was a criticality accident; some solution of Ur was put in a bucket or something when it needed to be in a nice, skinny cylinder to stay sub-critical. Three workers died, and they all saw the "blue flash" from Cerenkov radiation in their optic fluid. I only happen to know this because I was taking a class on radiation and health at the time, and the professor found it topical; I got the impression that things like this happen with some regularity.
Fuel reprocessing plants are much less heavily scrutinized than the power plants themselves, since they are less likely to cause massive damage to the surrounding populace. I don't have the numbers to hand, but my impression is that if you're looking for serious worker safety issues in nuclear energy, you should look to the reprocessing plants.
Fuel reprocessing plants are much less heavily scrutinized than the power plants themselves, since they are less likely to cause massive damage to the surrounding populace. I don't have the numbers to hand, but my impression is that if you're looking for serious worker safety issues in nuclear energy, you should look to the reprocessing plants.