MOSCOW, April 28, 1986 (UPI) - A nuclear accident damaged a reactor at a giant atomic power plant in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union said Monday, sending a radioactive cloud more than 1,000 miles to Scandinavia. Western diplomats feared a high death toll at the accident site.

Here is a list of major atomic power plant accidents reported outside the United States:

Scientists kept close watch Tuesday on radiation levels from a Ukrainian nuclear power plant accident, but experts said Western Europeans face no immediate threat from the cloud of fallout drifting from the Soviet Union.

MOSCOW, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - The Soviet Union said today the nuclear accident at its giant power plant north of Kiev was a ''disaster'' and that two people were killed. An unconfirmed report from the area said the death toll may have surpassed 2,000. (Editor's note: The report of the 2,000 deaths never was confirmed).

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - Swedish nuclear experts today said the accident at a giant Soviet nuclear power plant may have led to a reactor meltdown.

WASHINGTON, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - The Soviet nuclear disaster involved a power plant of ''uniquely a Russian design'' unlike any U.S. commercial facility but with some resemblance to a military reactor in Washington state, a top Energy Department official said Tuesday.

SEATTLE, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - There is little likelihood a plutonium-producing reactor at Hanford, Wash., would ever suffer an accident like the one that crippled a Soviet power plant because the two reactors are notably different, a U.S. Department of Energy official said Tuesday.

WASHINGTON, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - The United States, expressing regret to the Soviets Tuesday about a nuclear disaster in the Ukraine, formally offered technical and medical help but asked the Kremlin to release more information.

WASHINGTON, April 29, 1986 (UPI) -- The Soviet Union painted an idyllic picture of life in a town near its Chernobyl nuclear reactor, quoting one young mother in a recent magazine as saying, ''We don't even notice that we live close to a nuclear power plant.''

MOSCOW, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - Word of mouth and two brief media announcements about a nuclear disaster in the Ukraine were all it took to alarm the Soviet people, who are accustomed to reading between the lines of brief government statements.

MOSCOW, April 29, 1986 (UPI) - The Soviet Union asked the Swedish government for help in putting out a nuclear fire -- considered worse than a meltdown - at a giant nuclear power plant in Kiev, a Swedish diplomat said today.

MOSCOW, April 30, 1986 (UPI) - The Soviet government, on the eve of May Day celebrations, denied Wednesday ''gigantic destruction and fires'' in the nuclear plant disaster in the Ukraine but acknowledged 197 people were hospitalized.

LOS ANGELES, May 1, 1986 (UPI) - An American expert in bone marrow transplants, the only treatment for radiation sickness, left Thursday for the Soviet Union at Moscow's invitation to help victims of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

Polish mothers fed their offspring iodine tablets, Austrian children were forbidden from playing in the dirt and Swedes were told not to drink rainwater as fears of radioactive fallout from the Soviet nuclear disaster swept Europe Thursday.

WASHINGTON, May 1, 1986 (UPI) -- Government air monitoring networks in North America have measured no increase in radioactivity since the Soviet nuclear disaster as fallout disperses throughout northern Europe, officials said Thursday.