Brief History of: The Windscale fire

#History #Nuclear

Nearly 30 years before the disaster in Chernobyl that left Pripyat an abandoned ruin, a fire nearly caused a similar outcome. The Windscale fire in the United Kingdom would go down as one of the worlds worst nuclear incidents.

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[dondobbs]

"Oh no! There's a fire! Turn UP the

[ConnerLorenzCartoonSketches]

-*stares a nuclear reactor core in the face*
-*lives to 90*
Whatta absolute boss.

[justinvasko]

Wow, that plant manager was a real bad ass

[silverghost]

You have to give respect to Tom Hughes; he was willing to go down with his ship.

[becomematrix]

Aircooled porsche = nice. Aircooled reactor = not nice.

[correador]

The '40s and '50s were a frigging nuclear Wild West

[propositionjoe]

You didn't mention the fact that they over stressed the reactor because of massive pressure from the government to make enough material quick enough so they could make a bomb in an attempt to catch the USA. Designs were rushed, safety was thrown out of the window and covered up by a government that couldn't care less about the consequences as long as they could produce a nuclear weapon. If it wasn't for those filters stopping 95% of the radioactive material being thrown into the air it could of been so much worse. We like to criticize the Soviets with Chernobyl but the UK's government is no better. Nuclear for electricity generation is by far the best form of electricity production we have so far, shame about the governments that always mess it up.

[headwreck]

My grandmother was one of the chemists sent to test milk of dairy farms in Devon following this incident, where she met my grandfather. She couldn't tell him for years why she was testing the milk and grassland.

The cattle also suffered as the pasture they were eating was contaminated from the fallout.

[NikHYTWP]

*YOu cAn't haVe loSs oF cOolAnt If YOu hAvE No coOlaNt*

[BigYabai]

"Sir, I know the point of the air cooling is to not have loss of coolant, but what if it catches on fire?"
"Why worry about something that will never happen?"

[sophrapsune]

Thomas Tuohy showed incredible bravery & deserved a medal.

[johnbradley]

Back in 1990, I did an unusual recruitment agency job. I helped move the entire archive of blueprints for the UK nuclear program from a non-descript lock up on a trading estate near the BNFL campus, Birchwood, Warrington. Everything seemed to be there for every UK nuclear site, from the very first buildings built in late 1940s/early 50's to the last blueprints added in the late 80's..

Filthy job, huge cabinets with the blueprints laid out flat in tray-like draws, none of the blueprints had been touched since they were added over the decades of construction of nuclear reactors.

[rudyborkovic]

Love the low-key Brit storytelling, comforting, yet factual :-)

[lanesteele]

Im not an engineer but, that sounded like a bad idea from the start

[elennapointer]

My only guess as to why this firetrap was constructed is that as it was built in the1950s, the people who designed it didn't fully understand the potential for danger. Since the Manhattan Project had used an air-cooled reactor and successfully made nuclear weapons, that seemed to be the way to do it. It didn't help that the US refused to share its nuclear secrets with its allies, wanting to be the only nation with nuclear weapons and in spite of having received help from Britain during the Manhattan Project. As a result, those allies (UK, France) who wanted to become nuclear powers had to more or less crib from the few snippets of information that leaked from the US before the files were locked away, and then fill in the blanks with theory and guesswork. Result: unsafe practices and the inevitability of an accident.

[MostlyPennyCat]

We were SO LUCKY!! 😱😱😱
I remember being taught at school that the filter they built on top was ridiculed as "Cockcroft's Folley" and we're labelled a waste of time and money.

They caught 95% of the fallout and without them the North of England would have been uninhabitable.

The pile burnt for 3 days at up to 1, 200°C, enough to melt jet beams...

[fearsomemumbler]

Great vid, and also thats my granddad Tom Fisher driving the milk truck at 9:21 :)

[JulianFischerJulesBarner]

I think the point gone missing here is, that the reactor in its original form would have worked but the cooling fins of the cartriges were clipped shorter and shorter on purpose to gain a bigger yield of plutonium, which required a higher reactor temperature.
Would they just have left it as planned the cartriges probably wouldn't have overheated to splitting and fires.
Of course they were afraid, that the americans would pull out of mutual assisted research programmes if the UK wasn't on the leading edge of Plutonium production, but the windscale disaster harmed the UK-USA relationship in this point.

[PaulSteMarie]

Holy crap—this is orders of magnitude beyond Three Mile Island. Just insane.

[bificommander]

You think the "graphite tip" is a terrible design flaw... and then you see this. "Yeah, we just push in new fuel canisters, which should shove the old ones out of the back. Hopefully they'll land in the water behind it, otherwise we occasionally check if any of them have to be pushed in. And we cool it by blowing air over it, which then exits via the chimney. Some stupid bureaucrat insisted we put a filter on that chimney. Our tax dollars at work, am I right? Anyway, welcome to the team, here's your broom, go sweep the canisters. "