Here’s another fun one: the Chalk River reactor outside Ottawa, Canada, had a meltdown in 1952, releasing 10 kiloCuries* (informally known as a shitload) of radioactive material. The United States Navy sent a team to assist with the cleanup. One of the members of the team was one James Earl Carter, Jr.
That’s right, Jimmy Carter helped rescue Ottawa.
* I tried finding a comparison of this to Chernobyl, but what I found reminded me of what a pain in the ass radioactivity units are. Suffice it to say that Chernobyl was significantly larger, though.
Okay, after realizing the mistake I made in unit conversion, Chalk River was actually much less than a shitload. One TBq is 27 kCi, so Chalk River was about 0.37 TBq. For comparison, the Goiânia incident (which is its own special…) was about 74 TBq. I can’t seem to find a reliable number for Chernobyl, but it seems to be a couple orders of magnitude higher.
Edit again: No, I screwed that up again. 1 PBq is 27 kCi. 1 PBq is 1000 TBq, so let me try this again:
Chalk River: 0.37 PBq
Goiânia: 0.074 PBq
Chornobyl: A lot of PBq, probably somewhere in the thousands.
Incidentally, a disclaimer: if you use any calculation on nuclear stuff by me for serious uses you’re an idiot.