Operational experience in nuclear power facilities has increasingly been recorded over the years in quest for everimproving regulatory compliance and safety monitoring. However, existing efforts to collect this experience are usually scope-specific, lack openness, sufficient comprehensiveness, harmonized information, and are fragmented across utilities, regulators, and the international community. Our group has been compiling a database primarily covering safety-relevant events within the civil nuclear power facilities around the world. The database contains consistent information assimilated from different reliable sources. It serves as an open-access resource for scientists, regulators, operators, and other potentially interested audiences. The database is being continuously reviewed and analyzed by experts in the field of nuclear safety, and currently contains about 960 events over roughly five decades. A brief description of each event, and information about its trigger, origin, cause, contributing factors, failure sequence, degree of failure, severity, and others are provided in a user-friendly searchable manner. Moreover, the ETH database is used to support the construction of generic data-driven PSA models, enabling precursor analysis, and providing event-specific risk metrics. Finally, we aim at applying modern statistical methods to study safety at a more granular level, identify trends, and analyze emerging patterns. As an example of first results, the number of significant events appears to be following a decreasing trend over time, demonstrating the vast improvements in nuclear safety.