Britain's Chernobyl: The Nuclear Disaster You've Never Heard Of | Nuclear Winter | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] it was Colonel Paul Tibbetts who took War forward into the nuclear age when he dropped a single atomic bomb known as little boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August the 6th 1945 from a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay 130 000 people were killed and of the city's 76 000 buildings all but six thousand were destroyed three days later a second device was exploded over Nagasaki and Japan surrendered the use of the bomb to destroy Hiroshima Nagasaki was the most powerful imaginable demonstration of the destructive force of the bomb the terrible capability of nuclear weapons had been shown for the first time and they began a scramble by the world's most powerful Nations to develop their own bomb [Music] one of those was Britain and a secret plant was built at windscale a remote spot on the northwest coast of England to manufacture plutonium the man-made element which gives Atomic weapons their terrifying power [Music] but the British reactors designed and built for the purpose had one major flaw and within seven years of the start of production would become the site of the world's first nuclear accident windscale was an accident that was waiting to happen it was here at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert that the Manhattan Project the wartime work to build a nuclear weapon was carried out in utmost secrecy it was led by Major General Leslie Groves a U.S army engineer the chief scientist was J Robert Oppenheimer the idea that nuclear fission could be used in the creation of the most powerful weapon the world had seen was first put forward in the late 30s in Britain the moored committee was set up to investigate the possibilities and reported in 1941 but it was the United States which undertook to build the first atomic bomb a task it completed in less than three years that it was able to achieve its AIMS in such a short space of time was a testament to the country's determination scientific abilities and Industrial muscle three New Towns were built Los Alamos was where the scientific team was based and where testing was carried out while production of fissile material took place at Oak Ridge Tennessee and at Hanford in the Pacific Northwest the Hanford reactors were designed around a graphite core cooled by water drawn from the Columbia River such was the concern over the potential for a nuclear accident that a 25-mile four-lane highway was built to allow the Swift evacuation of workers scientists knew that if the water supply failed it would be impossible to shut down the reactors before a nuclear explosion but the pressure to manufacture plutonium was so high that the risk was judged to be acceptable if you love history then you'll love history hit our extensive library of documentary features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to sink the Bismuth history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and timeline fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout when the land upon which Hanford would be built was acquired twelve hundred people lived within its 625 square miles construction was a massive undertaking but the speed of progress allowed the first fissile material from Hanford to be delivered to Los Alamos in the spring of 1945. it was eagerly awaited by the scientists and preparations were made for the world's first nuclear explosion codenamed Trinity the device was raised to the top of 110 foot high metal Tower and tested in the early hours of July the 16th 1945. to the Delight of Oppenheimer and Groves it was successful producing a blast equivalent to 20 000 tons of TNT it was very important for the U.S government that the bomb project should be successful for changing reasons initially because they were afraid Germany might get a bomb first so that became a fact it was a early on a factor in thinking about the war with Germany then secondly when Germany was defeated and the bomb still wasn't quite ready but nearly ready of course the whole Focus was on the war with Japan and there the importance of the bomb was that it would help to bring the war to an end quickly when a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days after the Hiroshima explosion Japan immediately surrendered the destructive power of this new weapon shocked the world but served also to convince politicians that membership of the nuclear club would bring with it a world status few countries could hope to achieve Britain had been very much the junior partner in the Manhattan Project though its scientists had had access to some of the pool of American knowledge the Soviet Union was aware of what had been going on at Los Alamos through a British spy Klaus Fuchs though at diplomatic level there was no more than the merest hint of the kind of weapon the United States planned to deploy the only thing that was done was that at the Potsdam meeting in July of 1945 after the bomb had been successfully tested in Alamogordo Truman went up to Stalin after one of the formal sessions and remarked to him that we have a bomb of unusual destructive power and Stalin apparently said nothing just nodded his head maybe said Thank you or but in any event went back talked to his people and it was clear he understood that what Truman had in mind was the atomic bomb because the Soviet Union had very good intelligence about the Manhattan Project post-war Britain was in a much weaker State than it had been before 1939 though it took two decades before the country began to come to terms with its new world position it seemed entirely natural to pursue a nuclear policy so scientists were set to work creating an independent nuclear weapon a deterrent in the cold war with the Soviets the project had nothing like the money and resources available to the Americans so an early decision had to be taken over which facile material would form the heart of the British weapon the Manhattan Project had hedged its bets by creating two production sites Each of which made a different core element the task of Oak Ridge was to manufacture uranium-235 whilst Hanford created plutonium in its water-cooled graphite reactors neither technique was particularly easy but there were advantages in following the plutonium route and at first the British government set about looking for a site to house two water-cooled reactors along the lines of those at Hanford the Americans had realized very early on that such a design carried inherent risks if the coolant system failed the pile would quickly become an atomic bomb so that plant had been cited on a loop of the Columbia River to give easy access to the 25 000 gallons of water a minute needed to keep each reactor cool but Hanford covered over 600 square miles and there was nowhere in Britain suitable which met all of the requirements for such a design so instead the engineer in charge of production Christopher Hinton felt the only feasible solution was to build reactors cooled by air Christopher Hinton was extremely resistant to the idea that he should build water-cooled reactors in England because he knew the reactors at Hanford were far from safe and that they had deliberately been built in a very very remote site and there was no room no sight in England remote or in Britain sufficiently remote in his opinion to have um a water cooled reactor safely cited there so the decision was made to opt for air cooling a system previously rejected by The Americans the enhanced safety offered meant that a site much closer to inhabited areas could be used and eventually a former Royal ordinance Factory on the cumbrian coast was chosen but British scientists were at a disadvantage although they had been given access to many of the Manhattan Project Secrets they hadn't been allowed near the plutonium-producing site at Hanford and their knowledge of the process was sketchy furthermore the McMahon Act of 1946 for bad American scientists from sharing nuclear secrets with any foreign National But as time went on there were informal meetings between British and American nuclear physicists notably one in 1949 involving Edward Teller he had worked with Enrico Fermi on the first ever nuclear pile at the University of Chicago teller who went on to Mastermind the hydrogen bomb met with Scientists from the atomic energy Authority at its Harwell headquarters there was a visit from two or three American scientists teller and vigna and zigner who was a Hungarian Refugee scientist very distinguished Hungarian scientist in in USA who was obviously the discoverer of ignorant energy he said that he thought that the there was a danger of Afar in one of the one of the British reactors because she said that as a result of irradiation you will get energy slowly building up in in the graphite and then unless you can find a way to release it you are going to have an explosive situation but although the British scientists listened to the warnings from teller and vigna they failed to pass them on to their colleagues at Risley responsible for the design and construction of the windscale piles the energy State discovered by vigna and pointed out to the British in 1949 would prove to be the cause of a fire in the number one reactor eight years later when the graphite moderator collected a potential energy from the irradiation process vigna's prophetic warning suggested that the release of this energy unless properly controlled could lead to just such a conflagration produces fast neutrons the neutrons produce fission but in the reactors they do it primarily not in the original fast state but after they have been slowed down by many coalitions with nuclear these conditions is too clear displaced is to create and in a graphite reactor for instance quite a number of the displaced carbon nuclei it means stuck in a state different from their laws from the equilibrium state if then at a later time the whole reactor is heated to somewhat higher temperature then the nuclei from there somewhat higher energy position find back into the original lower position and in doing so release the energy that they had contained that in turn gives rise to increasing the person which of course accelerates the process that I have already described and so you know said the actors run at a relatively low temperature if the temperature is increased May undergo a process of instability and this possibility should be taken into account in the design of the reactor within a few months of the conversation about vigna energy a visit to the Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee by the director of the atomic energy Authority Lord cockcroft led to a decision which would have a far-reaching effect a decade later during his trip a release of radioactivity was found within the site which was believed to have come from the chimneys of the Clinton reactor a prototype air-cooled pile similar to the design adopted by the British at winscale the release worried cockcroft even though American scientists had already rejected a need for any filtration of the cooling air after it passed through their reactor on his return to Britain he insisted that the windscale chimneys be fitted with filters to catch any radioactive particles and prevent their escape to the surrounding Countryside it was a major engineering headache by this time construction work was well Advanced and the only place the filters could now be placed was in hurriedly designed Galleries at the top of the 400-foot chimneys cockcroft's insistence caused much friction distraction was very difficult building a filter gallery that high up you know hauling all that amount of the material up and doing the construction at that height and then also of course maintaining the filters was very difficult because the the big filter pan frames had regularly changed and very often they were done in a howling Gale above Cloud level and it was a horrendous job the first pile went critical towards the end of 1950 with the second following eight months later but by now the pressure on the atomic energy authority to begin the production of plutonium was intense Britain was being left behind in the arms race and the timetable for the development of an atomic bomb laid down in the overall strategic plan of May 1947 had been overtaken by world events the Russians I think really surprised the West they had got a crude atom bomb uh testable and actually tested it in 1949 most people seem to think that was three or four years ahead of when the Americans expected them to do it the biggest surprise though was the development of the h-bomb because while the United States had developed an h-bomb by about 1952 and tested a crude one the Soviets came in only a year later so in that sense there was a lot of progress on the Soviet side it took them years to deploy The Finnish systems but at the testing level they were pretty advanced with the Cold War growing in intensity the British desire to move forward could only increase every effort was put into making the wind scaled piles as efficient as possible to meet the deadline for a first atomic test in 1952 and although the production of plutonium reached its Target on schedule there were some worrying incidents in the behavior of the reactors that year in May there had been an unexplained temperature rise in the number two pile and four months later smoke was seen coming from the core of the other reactor following a shutdown it turned out that the smoke was simply caused by oil particles being blown onto the hot graphite from the cooling fan bearings but the unexpected temperature rise was a worry for scientists consultations were carried out with the Americans and it became apparent the cores lay in the release of vigna energy exactly what Harwell had been warned about three years earlier a month later on the 3rd of October 1952 the first British Atomic test was carried out aboard a ship moored off the northwest coast of Australia using plutonium from windscale for the politicians and scientists it was a Triumph Britain had gained entry to the nuclear Club building the bombs seemed just the natural thing it was one of the great powers in spite of being greatly weakened by the economic costs of the war but still it was a kind of natural thing and and hardly anybody opposed a decision of course it was carried out in in secrecy there wasn't a great public debate about it it just sprang from a certain assumption that yes well Britain should have the bomb and the British did in fact expect to be the second to develop an atomic bomb and were very taken aback by the Soviet test which came in 1949 where the first British test was 1952 and Western intelligence had in fact predicted that the first Soviet test would probably be 1953 maybe 1954. so the British then suddenly found that they weren't the second nuclear power they were now the third nuclear power and increasingly through the 50s especially after both the United States and the Soviet Union developed the hydrogen bomb again Britain you know was then again lagging further behind so I think the 1950s were a period of some tension in British nuclear policy because there there wasn't a the fundamental revision of assumptions saying oh we shouldn't have these things at all you know we can rely on the Americans or you know we don't need them or they're immoral or whatever so the government didn't go that far on the other hand it was finding it very difficult to keep up uh in this race or to stay in this race when the United States and the Soviet Union could mobilize such massive resources into not merely developing new kinds of weapons but building you know large numbers of them and delivery vehicles and so on so I think it was a very difficult period for the British throughout the mid-50s atomic tests were carried out by each of the three nuclear powers the windscale piles remained the only production source of plutonium in Britain and there was Heavy pressure on the atomic energy Authority production group not only to meet demand for that element but also for others such as tritium and polonium required for the testing of a hydrogen device so two reactors of a new type cooled by carbon dioxide rather than air were commissioned next to the existing piles and construction work began in August 1953 two years later the need for plutonium had become so desperate that a further six of these magnox reactors were ordered meanwhile a system had been developed to deal with the buildup of potentially hazardous vigna energy in the graphite core of the windscale piles after every 30 000 megawatt days of irradiation it would be released by a process called annealing although the technique occasionally threw up a problem generally it worked well but then in October 1957 there was the accident scientists feared most during the ninth anneal the worst case scenario predicted in 1949 by vigna and Teller came about the number one pile caught fire by the beginning of October 1957 eight anneals had been carried out to release stored vigna energy from the two piles but scientists had noted that some had been less than fully successful occasionally it was difficult to balance what had been described by Edward Teller as the vigna instability while the anneal progressed and despite the opening of The Calder Hall reactors the previous year there was still a tremendous pressure on the piles to produce plutonium along with a growing number of Isotopes for research work there had been a further 13 British Atomic tests since hurricane in 1952 and the first trial of a thermonuclear device was scheduled for the following month the government was enthusiastic about the status and world-standing nuclear weapons conferred the previous July prime minister Anthony Eden said it is on the thermonuclear bomb and the atomic weapons that we now rely not only to deter aggression but to deal with aggression if it should be launched things seem to be going well in the military program but unbeknown to those who controlled the windscale piles the warnings of teller and vigna warnings which at the time had been largely ignored were about to lead to the world's first major nuclear accident on the 7th of October 1957 the number one pile was ready for the ninth anneal just before midday its cooling fans were shut down and the first of the control rods were run out to introduce nuclear heating into the lower part of the pile it was this process of heating the graphite which allowed the displaced carbon atoms to return to their normal position an action which itself introduced a further heating effect in the early hours of Thursday the 10th a monitoring device on the weather station roof showed an increase in radioactivity but it wasn't until a second larger release that the operator's suspicions were aroused it coincided with a further rise in the pile temperature and it was obvious to all that number one pile was in serious trouble when four channels were opened up to eject the uranium fuel rods they were seen to be glowing bright red there could be no doubt now that the pile was on fire the decision to look into the reactor was taken by a man called Tom Hughes colleague of mine for many years sadly with this no longer and he was second in command to me on the operation side I was second in Commander Davey overall and he made the decision quite a brave one to have a plug pulled out and look into the actor and this was to look at the channel where a thermocouple was showing an increasingly high temperature and had been doing for about the last 48 hours and he didn't see Flames but he saw four few four channels of fuel elements each plug you pulled out gave access to four channels of the fuel elements and they were all the ends of the ones you could see were all glowing red so Tom chewy set off to drive to windscale to assess the condition of the number one pile for himself wearing a mask and air bottle he climbed the 80 feet to the top of the reactor building to see exactly what was going on inside from the roof you could look down through four inspection holes and I went up there and looked down and I there were no flames coming out of the back of the reactor at that time but there was a dull red glow and during the night I climbed up several times and Flames began to flicker out of the channels and they were quite modest to start with but eventually they were just a raging Inferno at the back of the reactor and the Flames were impinging upon the wall um across what was called the water duct there was a we pushed fuel out of the horizontal challenge in the reactor and they fell down into a into skips which were underwater well the wall on the other side Flames were impinging upon this and I remember that one of the civil engineers had said to me that if that wall exceeded 600 degrees Centigrade the roof one which I was standing could collapse which wasn't a very pleasant thought but I didn't really believe in Tom Hughes had already discharged some of the uranium cans around the fire to try to stop it spreading Chewie decided an attempt should also be made to eject those at the heart of the fire by pushing them out through the back of the reactor using scaffolding poles but they refuse to move however hard they were pushed when these were pulled back onto the working area the charge hoist they were red hot and on one occasion when this was happening you know Paul came back there was also molten metal dripping off the end of it which had to be molten irradiated uranium and of course this was causing a big radiation problem on the charge hoist itself the situation was critical and called for immediate action to bring the fire under control the problem was how could this be achieved there was a great deal of discussion about the options available but at the Forefront of everybody's thinking was an overriding need to exercise Extreme Caution to avoid increasing the spread of radioactivity well the nice thing to do would be to have large quantities of an inert gas to try and feed that in but then feeding it in wasn't going to be easy anyway and we discussed the use of carbon dioxide it so happened that uh a tanker had come in to call the hall that day with 25 tons of liquid carbon dioxide so that we had plenty of it but I had done some experiments with the fuel plant down in Springfield trying to put out hot metal fires with different types of extinguisher including including carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide had no effect the only other thing that we had available was water and we were not too enthusiastic about putting water onto burning graphite because you can produce a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen which under certain circumstances can be explosive so carbon dioxide was tried first a hose was set up on the charge hoist to deliver the gas directly into the burning channels it was a hazardous task requiring the operator to be right up against the face of the reactor so the CO2 could be delivered and its effect monitored but the results were disappointing and it had not the slightest effect just went on burning as merrily as ever so carbon dioxide wasn't any good even if we had a means of Deliverance in large quantity which we didn't so the only thing we were left with was water hose was wired to a scaffolding Pole to allow the water to be delivered into the burning channels chewelis and anxiously for any signs of a hydrogen reaction as the pressure was turned up to maximum and I went up to the top of the reactor once again for the umpteenth time and looked down the back and there the water was most of it was shooting straight out the back of the reactor and as far as I could see making absolutely no difference to the fire right so I had the pressure reduced so the water at least was was sinking in through the graphite blocks onto the fire but it wasn't the water on its own that put the fire out it was eventually shutting down the the cooling fans that had to be on if men were working on the charge Heist on the working area the ventilation system was such that if you didn't have the shutdown fans running then you could get radioactive contaminants coming back from the reactor into the working area with the shutdown fans on the airflow was from the working area into the reactor so we had this horns of an enormous dilemma a raging infernia and further in the heart of the reactor and yet we were supplying air to it The Operators were fighting hard to cope with a situation for which they had never been trained but once the area was evacuated and the shutdown fans turned off it seemed at last that the battle to put out the fire was being won and I was up then on the top of the router looking down the back and the effect was dramatic I could just see the fire dying away the Flames would leaking against the wall across the water deck and I could see them actually dying back and I went up and inspected several times and the water went on at about well just before nine o'clock in the morning and by noon I was satisfied that the fire was out whilst the battle was going on inside the pile building to fight the Fire Health physicists had begun to assess the dangers caused by the release of radioactivity there were three ways in which the population outside the plant could be affected by external radiation inhalation of radioactive material or through the food chain it was quickly realized that the biggest danger came from the ingestion of iodine 131 a radioactive isotope with a half-life of About a Week its intake would lead to an increased likelihood of thyroid cancer and children were the most vulnerable the route from deposition on ground through grass to the cow to milk to child it is a very effective rooted now cacao covers normal a great deal of area grazing and it collects the iodine from a big area concentrates in the milk and then children young children if they're drinking cow's milk uh that then get a substantial intake so we were very much concerned with making sure that the milk it was significantly contaminated it didn't get to these children in retrospect it's astonishing there was no calculated safety limit at the time for the intake of iodine 131 if anyone had given thought to the consequences of an accident at the windscale site no research work had been done in Britain to give scientists a baseline from which they could operate in the United States the minimum distance between plutonium factories like Hanford and surrounding populations was laid down in the sighting requirements but in Britain the agricultural areas of West Cumbria went right up to the windscale fence so during the night a small group began the task of working out what a safe limit for iodine 131 in a child would be and it was using these hastily calculated figures that the area of worst contamination was defined milk from farms within it was disposed of largely by dumping it in the sea and fresh supplies were brought in from outside the whole area was about 200 square miles and at the peak areas which was just to the slightly to the southeast of the sellerfield side uh figures in milk went up to about 10 times the figure we'd set at the trigger level so I think we we needed to act it was no doubt in the area around windscale there was little alarm the operation to replace contaminated milk with supplies from elsewhere worked effectively though gradually the size of the affected area was increased news of the milk ban along with initial details about the fire was released at a press conference the following Sunday the reaction was muted and although restrictions on milk supply continued for a little over a month in total the greatest concerns seem to come from those living away from the immediate area basically the problem got worse the public relations problem got worse the further away you got from sellerfield and the peak problem was undoubtedly where people living in the South had got children in boarding schools close to the area and they were certainly very worried but generally speaking the people in the area weren't because they could see life was going on in the ordinary way now that the fire in number one pile was out the next concern was to stop the possibility of any further spread of radioactivity from the pile chimney the filter gallery for which cockcroft had been so criticized for insisting upon during construction they'd become known as cockcroft's Follies had stopped The Escape of some radioactive particles but there was now a worry that high winds could dislodge them and spread them around the countryside a way of preventing that had to be found so there was a committee meeting set up and I couldn't believe my ears were sort of things that were being talked about and the most fancied approach was to get uh three helicopters and make a lid and put these three helicopters carry the lid up and put on top of the chimney well I don't know how long this would have taken but I thought well there's an easy way of doing it so I got a hold of the chief engineer and I said look is it possible to get men up outside the chimney on the platform it's formed by the the filter house itself and to get some pipes over the top and to pump some really heavy oil on top of these filters and he thought about and he said yes I said all right let's do it and that's what we did to seal in the radioactivity so William penny chaired a hastily put together Board of inquiry into the causes of the fire it took just two weeks to produce a report and its findings seemed straightforward it was most likely they said that the fire had been caused by the use of excessive nuclear heating during the operation to release vigna energy from the graphite this had caused one or more of the aluminum cans containing irradiated uranium to burst the uranium had then oxidized releasing more heat and this combined with the heat generated by the vigna energy had led to the fire however the inquiry couldn't rule out an alternative possibility that it had been a lithium magnesium alloy rather than a uranium can which had burst it was felt that prompt and efficient action had been taken and that it was most likely there would be no harmful health effects Penny said he had felt it important to report quickly because of public anxiety you of the atomic energy Authority was that though it didn't look too wonderful the thing to do was to bite the bullet and publish the report in full come clean about it but and they recommended that and the ministry of Defense actually said there is no reason for this to be a secret report and but the Prime Minister for these political reasons which were so overwhelming in his mind I said no this report could not be published in full the report was studied by the atomic energy Authority which accepted that instrumentation on the pile had been inadequate the simply were not enough thermocouples the devices which measured spot temperatures in a number of the channels to give operators an accurate view of what the reactor was doing during a vigna release a subsequent re-examination by Sir John Hill published in January 1958 cast doubt on the uranium cans being the probable source of the fire he showed that the lithium magnesium cans for which the pile had not been originally designed failed at a much lower temperature than those containing uranium but what neither Hill nor the penny inquiry were ever told about was an earlier fire in an oven used to test the fuel rods before they were put in the reactor 40 years on Tom Tui spoke publicly for the first time about a previous accident he helped cover up which he feels confirms Penny's View one of the tests that was done both at Springfield and then repeated when the fuel was received at windscale was to heat the fuel elements for 48 hours to a temperature of 300 degrees Centigrade which was about uh well 50 degrees lower than the temperature you expected to operate at the mat in the reactor and this was done in ovens which and two tons of fuel was put into each oven for 48 hours and to our horror uh one morning when an oven was open the whole fuel Mass was on fire now this was at a temperature as far as we know because there was no evidence that the the oven had behaved in a any improper manner uh less than we would normally be operating the fuel net in the reactor now I I'd forgotten all about this when I was interviewed at the uh the court of inquiry chaired by Sir William penny but looking back on it now I think that this is something of really quite considerable significance and as far as I'm concerned it uh it enhances the view of the court of inquiry that the fire almost certainly started in the uranium fuel itself during the vigna release looking back from four decades on it's much easier to see the Cold War period in perspective Britain had suffered because of the second world war in ways it would only later fully realize and accept there remained a government view that the country could continue to play a dominant role in the world and still had the economic strength to develop independent nuclear weapons and their Delivery Systems it had been an astonishing act for British scientists to design a nuclear weapon in such a short space of time without access to the key features of the pool of knowledge accumulated by the Manhattan Project though there were suspicions the Americans had provided some help despite the straitjacket of the McMahon Act quantify exactly what the nuclear program cost Britain but it's undoubtedly true that the environmental cost of the 1957 fire would have been much greater had cockcroft not insisted that the filter galleries be built on the pile chimneys it's ironic that this insistence was based not on sound scientific judgment but on the misinterpretation of an American accident the site emergency at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Plant which had inspired cockcroft's demands have been attributed at the time to releases of uranium particles from the chimney of the Clinton air-cooled reactor only later was it realized they had come instead from the nearby chemical separation plant but for that error contamination of the cumbrian countryside could have been much worse but perhaps the overriding question about the background of the windscale fire is whether Britain at the end of a long and costly War should have gone ahead with a nuclear weapons program at all I think that it's an absolutely understandable decision it's hard for me to imagine that the decision at the time it was taken and the context it was taken could have been different but I think in retrospect one one could argue that it was actually a mistake because what it did was actually make it more difficult for Britain to readjust and rethink its foreign policy given its new kind of status in the world and that the nuclear project became a symbol of what was increasingly and outmoded position in the world it would have been difficult to imagine a more embarrassing time for the fire to have happened Britain had only recently embarked on the world's first nuclear power program and The Calder Hall Station next door to windscale although designed and built to produce plutonium had been opened by the queen in a blaze of publicity about its generating capability only the previous year it is with pride that I now open called a hall Britain's first atomic fire station this new source of power had been received enthusiastically amid claims it would make electricity too cheap to meet her to have had something casting such serious doubt on the safety of the nuclear power stations which were going to be built all over the country was really pretty shattering and the other reason that it was such a very unfortunate town for them was that the Prime Minister Who had who was determined as the sort of Jewel in his the crown of his Premiership and that she was going to achieve the nuclear partnership with USA that the British had so long been trying to re-establish um ever since the war and he saw it within his grasp and he was just going off the in October 1957 to Washington Washington for crucial talks with Eisenhower which he thought were going to lead to the restoration of collaboration but if the fire caused political embarrassment because of the Civil power program to come its effect on Military needs was negligible the first I think the first two Condor reactors were already operating there are four parient as it called a horn but of course they can also be operated in such a way as to produce military plutonium and that really was their purpose I mean the power production was a sideline to show that it could be done and it has been done very effectively as they've been operating now for 40 years um so the loss of the of the output from the windscale reactors wasn't such a bad thing from the military point of view uh from the point of view of producing power it didn't really make any difference because no one was ever going to build a another reactor like the like the diro winscale piles they were the biggest hot air machines that man has ever invented we've blasted cold air and at one end and hot air up the chimney the month after the windscale fire the British exploded their first Hydrogen device at Christmas Island they had finally reached their goal five years after the Americans and despite losing ground to the Russians along the way in such pioneering work it was inevitable that a level of technical ignorance and the pressure of political desire would combine to create a situation where safety was less important than it should have been no one has to appreciate in the first 15 or 20 years of the nuclear age and maybe to some extent now um people were rather easier with safety partly because of the the need to speed things up partly because there wasn't yet the clear understanding of how dangerous radiation was I mean that really was something which developed in radio biology in the 1950s and 1960s and of course you've also got to appreciate that these were the Cold War gears by 1948 the Americans had already got 50 usable atom bombs so they set up a very big production process as did the British later on so it to some extent the shortcuts taken during the second world war were not dissimilar to the shortcuts taken in the late 40s and 50s only this time it was because of the cold war and I think essentially safety one has to say took second place in many cases you see it especially in the way in which the weapons were deployed in now the idea of having planes flying more or less continuously with nuclear weapons on board as was routine in the 1950s seems almost Unthinkable but then the ideas about safety were frankly a lot cruder yet the man who warned the British of the dangers they faced is sanguine about the fire Dr Edward Teller has been a lifelong supporter of nuclear energy he argues that the value of the Lessons Learned was more than worth the economic and human costs involved wind scale will be remembered as something that added to our concrete knowledge without a really Dreadful experience expenditure and connected with real safety of human health the rush to build an atomic weapon and the decision to use air-cooled reactors were the real causes of the windscale fire it's so easy to look back over the decades and say it should never have happened but the political climate which existed after the second world war was very different from today's the Soviets were perceived as a real threat to the west and Britain was determined to maintain its place in the world pecking order if the Americans had been more Cooperative the Harwell scientists had paid more attention to the warnings of teller and vigna or the potential sites for water-cooled reactors had been more suitable things might have turned out differently but given the set of circumstances which existed the result was inevitable there is only one way to stop the fire happening and that was to shut down the reactors once we had a situation where we knew that was a big energy release you could get a very rapid rise in temperature if you were going to operate the reactors in an abnormal way with an abnormal control rod patterns which are instrumentation was not designed to cope with then you were running a risk and the only way to avoid that would have been not to operate the reactors foreign foreign

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Length: 49min 52sec (2992 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023