Britain's Chernobyl: The Windscale Nuclear Disaster | Windscale 1957 | Spark

it was Colonel Paul Tibbits 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 b29 bomber called the anola gay 130,000 people were killed and of the city's 76,000 buildings all but 6,000 were destroyed 3 Days Later a second device was exploded over Nagasaki and Japan surrendered the use of the bomb to destroy Hiroshima and 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 there began a scramble by the world's most powerful Nations to develop their own bomb one of those was Britain and a secret plant was built at windin a remote spot on the northwest coast of England to manufacture plutonium the man-made element which gives Atomic weapons their terrifying power but the British reactors designed and built for the purpose had one major flaw and within 7 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 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 US army engineer the chief scientist was J Robert Oppenheimer the idea that nuclear fishing 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 M 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 3 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 almus was where the scientific team was based and where testing was carried out while production of file material took place at Oakridge Tennessee and at Hanford in the Pacific Northwest the Hanford reactors were designed around a graphite core cooled by water drawn from the Colombia River such was the concern over the potential for a nuclear accident that a 25m 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 when the land upon which Hanford would be built was acquired 1 1200 people lived within its 625 square miles construction was a massive undertaking but the speed of progress allowed the first file 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 code named Trinity the device was raised to the top of 110t 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 uh very important for the US government that the bomb you know project should be successful uh 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 it Germany was defeated and the bomb still wasn't quite ready but nearly ready of course the whole f Focus uh 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 3 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 clous fuks though at diplomatic level there was no more than the mest hint of the kind of weapon the United States planned to deploy the only thing that was done was that at the poam meeting in July of 1945 uh after the bomb had been successfully tested in Alamagordo uh 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 uh uh went back talk to his people and it was clear he understood that what Truman had in mind was the at atomic bomb because the Soviet Union had very good intelligence about the Manhattan Project postwar 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 iets the project had nothing like the money and resources available to the Americans so an early decision had to be taken over which file 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 Gra fight 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 their plant had been sighted on a loop of the Columbia River to get give easy access to the 25,000 gallons of water a minute needed to keep each reactor cool but Hanford covered over 600 square mil 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 no site 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 mcmah Act of 1946 forbad 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 enrio fery 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 a visit from two or three amican scientists U tella and vigner and vigner who was a Hungarian Refugee scientist very distinguished Hungarian scientist in in um USA and who was obviously the discoverer of vigner energy he said that he thought that the there was a danger of a fire in one of the one of the British reactors because he said that as a result of irradiation uh 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 vigner they failed to pass them on to their colleagues at rizley responsible for the design and construction of the windscale piles the energy State discovered by vigner and pointed out to the British in 1949 would prove to be the cause of a fire in the number one reactor 8 years later when the graphite moderator collected a potential energy from the irradiation process viger's prophetic warning suggested that the release of this energy unless properly controlled could lead to just such a conflagration fishing produces fast neutrons the neutrons produce fish but in the reactors they do it primarily not in the original F state but after they have been slowed down by many collisions with nuclei these collisions with nuclei display this nuclear and in a graphite reactor for instance quite a number of the displaced carbon nuclei remains stuck in a state different from their lowest from their equilibrium state if then at a later time the whole reactor is heated to some high temperature then the nuclei from the 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 a increas in temperature which of course accelerates the process that I have already described and so V said reactors 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 vigner energy a visit to the Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee by the director of the atomic energy Authority Lord cockroft 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 windscale the release worried cockroft even though American scientists had already 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 hurridly designed galleries at the top of the 400t chimneys [ __ ] croft's insistence caused much friction construction was very difficult building a filter gallery that high up you know hauling all that amount of 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 pads in the frames had to be regularly changed and very often they were done in a howling Gale above Cloud l and it was a horrendous job the first pile went critical towards the end of 1950 with the second following 8 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 Russian 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 hbomb because while the United States had developed an hbomb 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 winds 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 the had been an unexplained temperature rise in the number two pile and 4 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 cause lay in the release of vgna energy exactly what Harwell had been warned about 3 years earlier a month later on the 3rd of October 1952 the first British Atomic test was carried out aboard a ship mored 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 bomb seemed just the natural thing it was one of the uh great powers in spite of being greatly weakened by the uh economic costs of the War uh but still it was kind of natural thing and and hardly anybody opposed the 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 uh expect to be the second to develop an atomic bomb and were very taken back by the Soviet test which came in 1949 where the first British test was 1952 and Western intell Ence 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 uh further behind so I think the 1950s were a period of um some tension in British nuclear policy because there there wasn't a a fundamental revision of assumption 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 in into uh not merely developing new kinds of weapons but building uh 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 2 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 potential ually hazardous vigner 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 anal the worst case scenario predicted in 1949 by vigner and Teller came about the number one pile CAU Fire by the beginning of October 1957 eight anneals had been carried out to release stored vigner 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 terer as the vigner instability while the anneal progressed and despite the opening of the cder 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 hurcan 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 seemed to be going well in the military program but unbeknown to those who controlled the windscale piles the warnings of terer and vigner 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 f the 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 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 rod s they were seen to be glowing bright red there could be no doubt now that the pile was on fire the decision to um look into the reactor was taken by a man called Tom Hughes colleague of mine for many years sadly with this no longer um and he was second in command to me on the operation sign I was second in command to Davey overall and he made the decision quite a brave one to have a plug pulled out and look into the reactor and this was to look at the channel where a thermac couple 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 fuel 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 ft 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 Flame coming out of the back of the reactor at that time but there was a dull red glow and during the night I I climbed up several times and Flames began to flicker out of the channels and uh they were quite modest to start with but eventually there was just a raging Inferno the back of the reactor and the Flames were impinging upon the wall [Music] um across what was called the water duct there was a we pushed fuel out of the horizontal channels 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 did 600° Centigrade the roof on which I was standing could collapse uh 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 its spreading chewy 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 refused to move however hard they were 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 and a pole came back there was also molten metal dripping off the end of it which had to be molten radiated uranium and of course this was uh causing a big radiation problem on the charge host 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 uh the nice thing to do would be to have uh large quantities of iner gas G to try and feed that in but then feeding in wasn't going to be easy anyway and we discussed the use of carbon dioxide um it so happened that uh a tanker had come into called a 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 at Springfields trying to put out hot metal fires with different types of extinguisher includ including carbon dioxide um and uh 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 uh which under certain circumstances can be explosive so carbon dioxide side 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 delivering it in large quantity which we didn't so the only thing we were left with was water a hose was wired to a scaffolding Pole to allow the water to be delivered into the burning channels chewy listened 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 tin's time I looked down the back and and there the water was most of it was shooting straight out uh the back of the reactor uh and as far as I could see making absolutely no difference to the fire so I had the pressure reduced so the water at least was uh 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 the cooling fans that had to be on if men were working on the charge 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 air flow was from the working area into the reactor so we had this horns of an enormous dilemma uh a raging Inferno Inferno 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 reactor looking down the back and the the effect was dramatic uh I could just see the fire dying away the Flames were were licking against the wall across the water duct 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 9:00 in the morning and by noon I was satisfied that the 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 it's 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 is a very effective route the cow covers normal a great deal of area grazing and it collects the iodine from a big area it concentrates them the milk and then children young children if they're drinking cow's milk uh then get a a substantial intake so we were very much concerned with making sure that the milk it was significantly contaminated 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 base line 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 cellfield side uh figures in milk went up to about 10 times the Fig figure we set set as a trigger level so the 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 safield and the peak problem was undoubtedly where people living in the South had got children in in boarding schools close to the area and that they were certainly very worried but generally speaking the people in the area weren't because they 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 cockroft had been so criticized for insisting upon during construction they'd become known as [ __ ] croft's folies 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 had to be found so there was a committee meeting set up and I couldn't believe my ears with s of things that were being talked about and the most uh fancied approach was to get uh three helicopters and make a lid with 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 this so I got a hold of the chief engineer and I said look is it possible to get men up outside the chimney uh on the uh platform that'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 him he said yes I said all right let's do it and that's what we did to seal in the radioactivity Sir William peny chaired a hastily put together Board of inquiry into the causes of the fire it took just 2 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 vgna energy from the graphi this had caused one or more of the aluminium cans containing irradiated uranium to burst the uranium had then oxidized releasing more heat and this combined with the heat generated by the vgna 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 the view of the atomic energy Authority was that though it didn't look too wonderful uh the thing to do was to bite the bullet and publish the report in full come clean about it but uh 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 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 there 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 vigner release a subsequent reexamination 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 chewy 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° Centigrade which was about went uh well was 50° lower than the temperature you expected to operate the mat in the reactor and uh This was done in ovens which and two tons of fuel was put into each ofen 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 at in the reactor now i' I'd forgotten all about this when I was uh interviewed at the uh at the court of inquiry ched 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 iranium fuel itself during the vgna 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 straight jacket of the mcmah ACT it's difficult to 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 cockroft 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 cock's demands had been attributed at the time to releases of uranium particles from the chimney of the Clinton aircooled reactor only later was it realized they had come instead from the nearby chemical separation plant but for that era contamination of the cumbrian countryside could have been much worse but perhaps the overriding question about the background to 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 uh 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 uh foreign policy uh given its new kind of status in the world and that the nuclear project became a symbol uh of what was increasingly an outmoded uh 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 marked on the world's first nuclear power program and the cuer 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 cder Hall Britain's first atomic Power Station this new source of power had been received enthusiastically amid claims it would make electricity too cheap to me 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 time for them was that the Prime Minister Who had who was determined as the sort of Jewel in his the crown of his Premiership um that he was going to achieve the nuclear partnership with USA that the British had so long been trying to reestablish 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 c reactors were already operating there are four four power reactors are called a wh but of course they can also be operated in such a way as to produce military plutonium and that really was their purpose uh I mean the power production was a a sideline to show that it could be done and it was 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 uh another reactor like the like the dear old windscale piles they were the biggest hot air machines that man has ever invented we blasted cold air in 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 5 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 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 uh 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 years 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 to some extent the shortcuts taken during the second world war were not dissimilar to the short cuts 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 me now the idea of having planes flying more or less continuously with nuclear weapons on board as was routine in the 1950s uh 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 sanguin about 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 exp 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 detered 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 terer and vigner 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 was 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 with a vigant energy release you could get a very rapid rise in temperature uh if you were going to operate reactors in an abnormal way with an abnormal control rod patterns which your 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 [Music]

Channel: Spark

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Keywords: British nuclear accident, British nuclear catastrophe, British nuclear disaster, British nuclear meltdown, British nuclear power plant, British nuclear reactor, Spark, UK nuclear accident, UK nuclear history, UK nuclear incident, Windscale, atomic crisis, historical disaster, historical event, industrial disaster, nuclear power plant, nuclear program, nuclear safety, radioactive contamination, radioactive fallout, radioactive leak

Id: S0DXndsQ0H4

Length: 49min 21sec (2961 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024