The "Fallout" From Three Mile Island Is Still Spreading

America's worst nuclear accident on record occurred at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979.

Deep within the labyrinth of piping and control mechanisms, a single malfunctioning valve failed to close - without notifying the control room.

Thinking everything was fine, operators carried on as usual. By the time shrieking alarm bells warned of rising core temperatures, it was already too late.

The reactor suffered a partial meltdown, damaging the core and releasing a tiny amount of exhaust gases. The anti-nuclear media firestorm began almost immediately afterward.

In most cases, the incident is referred to as the "Three Mile Island disaster." It birthed the long-standing public fear of nuclear energy that still lingers today.

Nowadays, the accident is usually mentioned alongside other large-scale meltdowns like Chernobyl or Fukushima - both of which are actually worthy of being called "disasters."

In 1986, the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, suffered a catastrophic meltdown, spewing nuclear material miles into the air and releasing a shock wave of radiation that was detected on far corners of the planet.

Thirty-one people were killed, hundreds more suffered intense radiation poisoning, and some areas of Ukraine are still uninhabitable almost 40 years later. That's what a real nuclear disaster looks like.

In 2011, in Fukushima, Japan, a massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake forced engineers to start an emergency shutdown of the reactors. The facility was successfully brought offline, but a sudden loss of power knocked out the critically important heat pumps.

Temperatures started to climb until the concrete reactor shields themselves actually melted, spewing huge amounts of radiation into the nearby ocean. After a decade of round-the-clock work, the reactor is still releasing millions of tons of radioactive waste into the water.

These events are true nuclear disasters - there's no denying that. But the two worst accidents in the industry's history had nothing to do with nuclear power itself.

Chernobyl was the direct result of Soviet Union hubris. The facility was incredibly outdated, poorly organized, and under enormous pressure to become the crown jewel of the empire. With competent leadership and modern technology, the Chernobyl disaster could have been avoided and simply been another Saturday.

Fukushima was built according to modern standards, and the Japanese government is more than competent enough to run it properly. But there was one fatal flaw: building a nuclear reactor next to the ocean in a country famous for its tsunamis - and on a fault line, no less.

Engineers claimed that the facility could handle everything the country's weather could throw at it. Unfortunately for the 50,000 civilians forced to evacuate their homes, that was a costly mistake.