The explosions and nuclear fuel rods melting at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, following the Sendai earthquake and tsunami have sparked an interest in previous nuclear-related accidents. The Guardian Data Blog have once again provided us with some interesting data to visualize. We’ve taken some of their data collected about nuclear power plant accidents since 1952. (N.b. these are not ALL of the nuclear power plant accidents that have happened around the world since 1952, just a selection of them).

The information is partly from the International Atomic Energy Authority – which, according to the Guardian Data Blog, fails to keep a complete historical database – and partly from reports.

How is the seriousness of each event ranked? The International Atomic Energy Authority ranks them using a special International Nuclear Events Scale (INES) – ranging from ‘anomaly’ to ‘major accident’, numbered from 1 to 7.

Bime was used to create this visualization. See it full screen here.