Bonus Episode. Part one of a two-part Halloween special. On December 30, 1958, a Los Alamos chemical operator switched on a stirrer and was hit by a blue flash of nuclear fire — then walked out of the tank room saying, "I'm burning up." This is the true story of Cecil Kelley, the loaded tank nobody warned him about, and the thirty-five hours that followed. All facts, told straight.
29 Oct 2026
Current Event Special: The Reactor That Came Back
On May 20, 2022, operators at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan permanently shut down its reactor. By August 2026, workers were placing fuel back into the same reactor.
The intervening four years involved changing ownership, substantial government financing, regulatory approvals, extensive equipment inspections, and an unusual reversal of a nuclear plant's retirement.
Palisades was being prepared to become the first American commercial nuclear reactor returned to service after entering decommissioning. As of October 28, 2026, the restart remains incomplete.
26 Oct 2026
S1E7: The Spokesman That Killed
A valve stuck open, a light that lied, and a spokesman who could not explain himself. The true story of Three Mile Island, 1979: the meltdown that was an engineering failure, and the communication failure that froze American nuclear power for thirty years.
25 Oct 2026
Nuclear Shadows: Fiction Under Investigation.
This episode examines a disaster that never happened: the 2024 Hong Kong film Cesium Fallout.
A recycling yard fire. A sealed cesium source. A storm carrying contamination across Hong Kong. None of it happened — but the film asks us to believe it could. So Morgan investigates it the way she investigates any other disaster: narrating the story, then fact-checking it at every point where it departs from reality. The poster fireball that physics won't allow. The magnesium. The Goiânia comparison. And a three-part verdict: was the accident plausible, were the consequences justified, and were the institutional failures credible?
22 Oct 2026
S1E6: The Glitter That Killed
Season 1, Episode 6. A powder that glows an impossible blue in the dark. They thought it was treasure — they rubbed it on their skin and gave it away as gifts. The true story of Goiânia, Brazil, 1987: the worst radiological accident in the Western Hemisphere, and the powder that killed with its beauty.
19 Oct 2026
S1E5: The Screwdriver That Killed
Picture a monster. Fangs, claws, fire, something you could at least see coming. The men in this story had a monster too, and they had a name for it. They called it the dragon. But this dragon was the size of a grapefruit. It sat perfectly still on a laboratory bench, cold and silent and ordinary to the eye. And it killed two men with something no eye can see, no ear can hear, and no hand can feel. Until it is far too late.
This is the story of the Demon Core. One ball of plutonium, two dead men, and a laboratory that watched the same experiment kill once, changed nothing, and watched it kill again.
18 Oct 2026
☢️ New bonus episode: "The Reactor That Killed... Itself?"
January 21, 1969. Lucens, Switzerland. An experimental reactor buried in a mountain cavern — built to prove the Swiss could go nuclear on their own — overheated, melted, and blew apart its pressure tube. No one died. The reactor was the only casualty.
The killer was invisible and months old: water from a blower seal had leaked into the coolant circuit, corroding the fuel cladding from the inside. No instrument caught it. By restart day, one fuel assembly was already doomed.
The twist: the accident did NOT end Switzerland's secret A-bomb program. That ran until 1988.
14 Oct 2026
S1E4: The Bucket That Killed — The Tokaimura Criticality Accident
They were told the plant needed no inspection. Then three men carried buckets into it, and poured them through a funnel, one after another, until the uranium did what uranium does.
On September 30, 1999, at a fuel-processing plant in Tokaimura, Japan, a routine procedure went catastrophically wrong — and a nuclear chain reaction started in a steel tank. It burned for twenty hours. Two years earlier, a fire at a nearby plant had been shrugged off. This is the story of what happened when nobody looked twice.
Nuclear Shadows is the true, unsettling history of nuclear accidents, told straight. No screaming, no sound effects. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Sponsored by flooftags — one-of-a-kind laser-engraved pet tags at flooftags.com
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12 Oct 2026
The Rod That Killed
At 09:01 on a January night, a control rod came out too far. Four milliseconds later, twenty-six thousand pounds of reactor were in the ceiling. The true story of SL-1: the night shift at an Idaho desert reactor, one pull of a rod, and the fastest disaster in American nuclear history.Nuclear Shadows is a documentary horror podcast — a calm voice telling terrifying true stories. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.
11 Oct 2026
The Warmth That Killed — The Lia Nuclear Incident | Nuclear Shadows Ep. 2
The forest was freezing. The strange metal boxes they found were warm — so the three men slept beside them. The true story of the Lia incident: two abandoned strontium-90 sources, a night in the Georgian woods, and the heat that was killing them.
No screaming, no sound effects — just the true, unsettling history of nuclear accidents, told straight. New episodes every Monday and Thursday.
#NuclearShadows #TrueHorror #NuclearHistory
10 Oct 2026
The Wall That Killed
She slept with her bed against the bedroom wall every night. The wall was killing her. The true story of a lost cesium-137 source, an ordinary Soviet apartment, and nine years of invisible murder.
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