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In late 2021, we received multiple inquiries from Snopes readers seeking to verify the authenticity of a fascinating story, told in several widely shared social media posts, about one of the pre-White House accomplishments of former President Jimmy Carter. For example, on Dec. 14 Jeff Lundeen posted a very widely shared tweet that contained an old picture of a young Carter, a screenshot of the anecdote, and the following caption: That tweet was itself drawn from an earlier Facebook post by the Historical Society of Ottawa, which can be seen below: The core claim from those accounts was that, as a young naval officer, Carter played a significant role in containing a nuclear meltdown. That claim was accurate, and we are issuing a rating of True. Carter, who was born in 1924 and grew up in Plains, Georgia, had a relatively short but distinguished naval career, as summarized by the U.S. Navy itself: On Dec. 12, 1952, an accident took place at the National Research Experimental (NRX) nuclear reactor at Chalk River, near the Canadian capital of Ottawa. A detailed, official Atomic Energy of Canada account of the incident and its aftermath can be found here and here. Having been promoted to lieutenant in June of that year, Carter was at that time on secondment from the Navy to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Reactor Development at Schenectady, in upstate New York. A 2019 video, vetted and published by All Hands, the official magazine of the U.S. Navy, contained the following account of the future president's involvement in the cleanup operation: Reflecting on the episode in 2008, Carter told the Canadian author Arthur Milnes that he and his team were exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation at Chalk River, as Milnes would later write for CNN:
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