I think we should include Karen Silkwood's murder!
I remembered one died while working on the Manhatten Project and found this. Not that I trust this source very much. These aren't all power related, but on a base level nuclear is nuclear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accidentIncidents
Criticality accidents have occurred both in the context of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.
* On 4 June 1945, an experiment at Los Alamos to determine the critical mass of enriched uranium became critical when water leaked into the polyethylene box holding the metal. Three people received non-fatal doses of radiation.<3>
* On 21 August 1945, Los Alamos scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. suffered fatal radiation poisoning after dropping a tungsten carbide brick onto a sphere of plutonium. The brick acted as a neutron reflector, bringing the mass to criticality. This was the first known criticality accident causing a fatality.<4>
A re-creation of the Slotin incident. The inside hemisphere next to the hand is beryllium, with an external larger tamper under it, of natural uranium. The 3.5-inch-diameter (89 mm) plutonium "demon core" (the same as in the Daghlian incident) was inside, and is not seen.
* On 21 May 1946, another Los Alamos scientist, Louis Slotin, accidentally irradiated himself during a similar incident, when a critical mass experiment with the very same sphere of plutonium (see demon core) took a wrong turn. Immediately realizing what had happened he quickly disassembled the device, likely saving the lives of seven fellow scientists nearby. Slotin succumbed to radiation poisoning nine days later.<5>
* On 16 June 1958, the first recorded uranium processing related criticality occurred at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. During a routine leak test a fissile solution was unknowingly allowed to collect into a 55 gallon drum. The excursion lasted for approximately 20 minutes and resulted in eight workers receiving significant exposure. There were no fatalities, though five were hospitalized for forty-four days. All eight workers eventually returned to work.<6>
* On 15 October 1958, a criticality excursion in the heavy water RB reactor at the Vinca Nuclear Institute in Vinča, Yugoslavia, killed one and injured five.<7>
* On 30 December 1958, the Cecil Kelley criticality accident took place at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Cecil Kelley, a chemical operator working on plutonium purification, switched on a stirrer on a large mixing tank which created a vortex in the tank. The plutonium, dissolved in an organic solvent, flowed into the center of the vortex. Due to a procedural error, the mixture contained 3.27 kg of plutonium, which reached criticality for about 200 microseconds. Kelley received 3,900 to 4,900 rads according to later estimates. The other operators reported seeing a flash of light and found Kelley outside, saying "I'm burning up! I'm burning up!" He died 35 hours later.<8>
* On 23 July 1964, a criticality accident occurred at the Wood River Junction facility in Charlestown, Rhode Island. The plant was designed to recover uranium from scrap material left over from fuel element production. An operator accidentally dropped a concentrated uranium solution into an agitated tank containing sodium carbonate, resulting in a critical nuclear reaction. This criticality exposed the operator to a fatal radiation dose of 10,000 rad (100 Gy). Ninety minutes later a second excursion happened when a plant manager returned to the building and turned off the agitator, exposing himself and another administrator to doses of up to 100 rad (1 Gy) without ill effect.<9><10>
* On 10 December 1968, Mayak (Russia), a nuclear fuel processing center in central Russia, was experimenting with plutonium purification techniques. Two operators were using an "unfavorable geometry vessel in an improvised and unapproved operation as a temporary vessel for storing plutonium organic solution"; in other words, the operators were decanting plutonium solutions into the wrong type of container. After most of the solution had been poured out, there was a flash of light, and heat. "Startled, the operator dropped the bottle, ran down the stairs, and from the room."<11> After the complex had been evacuated, the shift supervisor and radiation control supervisor re-entered the building. The shift supervisor then deceived the radiation control supervisor and entered the room of the incident and possibly attempted to pour the solution down a floor drain, causing a large nuclear reaction that irradiated the shift supervisor with a fatal dose of radiation.
* On 23 September 1983, an operator at the RA-2 research reactor in Centro Atomico Constituyentes, Buenos Aires, Argentina received a fatal radiation dose of 3700 rads (37 Gy) while changing the fuel rod configuration with moderating water in the reactor. Two others were injured.<12>
* On 30 September 1999, at a Japanese uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai, Ibaraki, workers put a mixture of uranyl nitrate solution into a precipitation tank which was not designed to dissolve this type of solution and caused an eventual critical mass to be formed, and resulted in the death of two workers from radiation poisoning.<13>
Since 1945 there have been at least 21 deaths from criticality accidents; seven in the United States, ten in the Soviet Union, two in Japan, one in Argentina, and one in Yugoslavia. Nine have been due to process accidents, with the remaining from research reactor accidents.
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Three workers are killed in a steam explosion at the U.S. National Reactor Testing Station outside Idaho Falls, Idaho. It is America's first fatal nuclear accident. All of the victims are buried in lead-lined caskets; one of them, Army Specialist Richard McKinley, is at Arlington National Cemetery. (At left is a photo of a nearby roadway being tested for radiation after the accident.)
