Windscale Britains Biggest Nuclear Disaster

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan met President Eisenhower to sign an agree that would change Britain's relations but just days before a fire had broken out at windscale the country's first nuclear reactor I looked down on to a blazing Inferno Britain was on the brink of an unprecedented disaster it goes up we will go with it the fire threatened to destroy the special relationship before it began you can imagine bottom dropping Adam let's stomach facing humiliation Macmillan decided to keep the truth about Britain's worst nuclear disaster secret he covered it up they'll example now secret tape recordings reveal the reasons behind McMillan's cover up her they said if he went over 1,200 god help us and why the men and women who fought the fire felt he betrayed them this is a story of political spin before the phrase was invented and how Britain's nuclear hopes turned into a nuclear nightmare I have never been so frightened in my whole life mankind had not faced anything like this ever before for a country that had suffered six years of war windscale was a symbol of the New Britain a symbol of hope it was a massive engineering project employing thousands of people at the frontiers of science it was the first big construction site that I'd ever been on it was like Makana on very large scale or it was a terrific achievement really yes a lot of people worked on that these were huge projects I mean they wouldn't consider yuge today but then there were from 1947 the building of Britain's first nuclear reactor at wings Gale took on epic proportions four thousand tons of graphite were used to build the two reactors the walls were seven feet thick the chimney 400 feet high occasionally they let me drive their cranes and bit it was fun it was like sort of model railways on a larger scale the wind scale reactor was a marvelous way of cutting our teeth this is this sounds very egocentric but this is to some extent the way that science goes you do it because it's fun suddenly science was sexy shut up for VIP no love everybody loves you anyhow that's how I feel I feel just like poly it was just part of this feeling of it sciences Cummings has done great things can do great things and will do great things and we were just part of it if one of us went to a conference there might be newspaper headline Adam man will be there it was very very heady more than 5,000 Adam men and women landed in a small part of the Northwest of England the locals came up with their own names for the invaders probably the favorite was the Atomics to describe the new people in the village actually member around all laughing one morning because of the headline Britain's are amazed heroes and then you did feel that we were in the vanguard of being something really new invest like visitors from Mars and a slightly sinister touch to the hospital atmosphere of the laboratory the local town of C scale just a few hundred yards from the site was becoming Britain's first atomic town Cisco was an absolutely marvelous place to grow up it really was our golf classes a ride in school ballroom dancing classes ballet classes dance tea dances even in the wind scale club and all the physicists and their wives who came in one year from University so it was a very young vibrant population all the people were young and ambitious keen alive there was chemistry was teachers there was physicist there was all kinds of people people from all over the world we all got on wonderfully well and dad it really was it was quite exciting see scale was called the brainiest town in Britain it was the biggest concentration of honours degrees and PhDs of anywhere in the country it was quite hilarious at school we couldn't have a physics teacher because they couldn't get anyone to come and teachers and apparently it was because all the homework that came in all the physics homework the standard of wood was far in advance of anything that is exceeds that ever heard of the class my daughter was in every child in the class past the 11-plus which had been unknown before in a briton still emerging from war when scale gave people hope so the party was someone just living in universities and starting a new job it was great because I was thrown in immediately with 20 or 30 more other mainly men all in the same boat and we were all staying at the whole hostel together so we all red rock climbing together and we all played rugby together and got drunk together and went up and dance every Friday night in the hostel itself which of white ball or seen but windscale wasn't built to fulfill the dreams of Britain's young atomic heroes it was built to make bombs at eight fifteen in the morning of august six japanese time the first atomic bomb struck an enemy target the bomb which had ended the war was now seen as the means of keeping the peace Britain believed its status as a world power was guaranteed by its relationship with America and their joint stewardship of the atom bomb neither the sure prevention of war nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States of America Churchill believed Britain and America had formed a lasting nuclear partnership when british scientists help build the atom bomb although the Americans had financed the bomb project at Los Alamos a crucial contribution had been made by some of Britain's most brilliant scientists but not everyone believed in a nuclear partnership between Britain and America they created this war winning weapon american taxpayer created two billion dollars were spent on it unimaginable sum of money and they felt in 1945 the the best way of ensuring that first of all America stayed on top and secondly that there weren't nuclear wars in with with rival nuclear powers was to keep this thing to ourselves it's ours we paid for it we're going to keep it to ourselves the idea that the United States was the ideal caretaker for this profound and dangerous knowledge you can smell the smoke of superiority of arrogance we did it you helped a little but you know really we did it in 1946 the Americans ended the nuclear partnership with Britain senator brien mcmahon's legislation made it a capital offense to reveal nuclear secrets even to their former allies it was a devastating rebuff for the new government of prime minister clement attlee well it was a terrific blow and Utley did everything he could to try and get the thing back on track that October in a secret cabinet committee aptly listen to his colleagues argue over Britain's bomb there is a enormous anxiety I think in the political class in Britain at this particular time that in order to retain our position for as long as we possibly can then we have to develop these weapons ourselves two ministers Stafford Cripps in a huge Alton were close to persuading Atlee that Britain could not compete with the Americans but then the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin arrived still bristling over a conversation he'd had with the American Secretary of State Evan Turner said no prime minister would do tall we've got to have this and one of the reasons he gave was very striking one they quite bluntly he said I don't mind for myself but they don't want any other foreign secretary of this country to be talked at I secretary of state in the United States as I have just had we've got to have this thing over here whatever it costs and we've got to have a bloody union jack flag on top of it Utley was persuaded Britain must have its own bomb not just for deterrence but he believed to persuade America that Britain was its natural nuclear a lie if you're in a nuclear relationship with them it's a bond it sets you apart from all the other countries in the world you're the the family member and that's terribly important to Britain as a as a as a world power Atlee turned to the one man he knew was capable of building a bomb he'd work closely with the Americans at Los Alamos and helped desire in the bombs that would be dropped on Japan his name was William penny see me particularly would like Mary's how you personally feel about the work to do well I think it's good to be done tony was the most interesting guy he come from very ordinary beginnings he was self-made and he had a funny little draw and he looked and spoke as though he was a bit simple quite honestly because he had brain like a razor brilliant mathematician and we were so lucky to have him and what your parents now sir well I have to send in my report to the government when I've done that I should have a short holiday and I heard the face and go single house yes bingo and thank you very much for talking to us penny faced a choice return to quiet academia or agree to at least request to build Britain's first atom bomb he had a wonderful offer of being principal I think of an oxford college but i think the politicians persuaded my father that britain should have a nuclear deterrent and he was persuaded that it was his duty to take on this awful job really Penny's nuclear achievements had been made in collaboration with American scientists but now he was on his own if we were going to do it we had to repeat work which they had already done because not published at enormous cost because cost us a lot in time we will way behind the Americans and producing atomic weapons but that Lee had faith in his scientists restarts the extraordinary invention radar we would split the atom we invented the jet engine we had an extraordinary impact I mean considering the size of the British scientific community compared to the American scientific community the flourishing the Tegra in World War two and subsequently was remarkable penny could at least rely on John cockcroft one of the pioneers of nuclear science cockcroft was appointed to run Harwell the new Atomic Research Establishment charged with reproducing the nuclear science the Americans already had with cockcroft at Harwell penny could set up aldermaston where the bomb would be made that left the most difficult task creating the vital ingredient for the bomb plutonium it meant building Britain's first nuclear reactor it was a huge task and it went to Britain's best engineer Christopher Hinton Hinton was enormous impressive he will aware when he came into the room that here was a very very imposing person he was well over six feet six foot two or three very keen face and piercing blue eyes and he was very much the leader the boss the planner the chap who knew what to do they were nicknamed the bold bad Barons penny Cockcroft and Hinton would mastermind Britain's atomic project they were arch merito crowds they certainly had no element of privilege in their background and there was a lot of that about in the postwar years I think they would have conformed to what CP snow called the new men the the the this ideal of people who make their own way and contribute on the basis their of their talents without class paying apart and so it was that windscale a small peninsular of land next door to the town of C scale became the home to Britain's first nuclear reactor the area had enjoyed brief popularity as a Victorian seaside resort but by the late 1940s its main industry was in decline well as with all mining areas there's been a history major accidents and one of the major pet losses here was 100 before people killed he'd also been very depressed area before the war it suffered massively during the Depression and so it was an area where people even though they may have had some questions in the back of their minds certainly would have seen this as a bright new future and God into a very clean and infinitely much save for industry and so that's why so many people welcomed it to build windscale Hinton needed the cutting edge nuclear science to come from Harlem tohar welcomes students from all parts the Commonwealth from the British Isles to learn something of the power plants of the Atomic Age the challenge the researchers at Harwell faced was to design a reactor a twin scale which would produce enough plutonium for the bomb when pieces of uranium are brought together a chain reaction occurs neutrons released by the uranium collide with neutrons from its neighbors releasing even more neutrons this chain reaction converts some of the uranium into plutonium but the chain reaction makes uranium ferociously hot left unchecked the reaction could go out of control like a bomb the british scientists knew the americans controlled a chain reaction by placing the uranium in hundreds of channels drilled through a block of pure graphite known as the core the Iranian becomes dangerously hot so to prevent it from catching fire the uranium was placed in aluminium cartridges which sealed it off from the air once the plutonium had been produced the hot cartridges were then pushed out of the back of the core into cooling ponds of water so the precious plutonium could be extracted but the most dangerous part of the process was while the cartridges were still inside the graphite core unless they were constantly cooled they could melt the core or set it on fire the British knew that the Americans had prevented this in their reactor at Hanford by pouring a constant stream of water through the channels but this system had a serious weakness if the water supply failed the core itself could explode the reactor would run very rapidly and I mean very rapidly within a second or so out of control at Hanford in North America there was a special certain mile-long escape road built as part of the safety precautions and we decided this country was far too small to have a reactor with such dangerous possibilities built anywhere not even in Scotland but the british scientists believed they'd found the answer to cool the hilt reactor better is a fan drive hair through a ventilating system a rabid when scales graph i'd call would be cooled not with water but with air blown through the core by huge fans and taking the heat up and out through enormous chimneys it convinced them that it would be safe to build a reactor next to see scale and work continued on Britain's most ambitious engineering project but the reactor was not being built as Christopher Hinton wanted he faced a deadline imposed on him by politicians they demanded that Britain should be a nuclear power by 1952 the same year the Soviet Union was expected to have the bomb for such new and untried science it was a horrendous deadline to meet the development work that should have been done at Harwell was all cut short by the extreme political and military pressure on them the very very tight deadlines they were given with time so short building had begun before the research work was complete a year into construction a scientist at Harwell made a devastating discovery construction hood was well on the way and the air was going to be discharged up at chimneys 400 feet high I think in the earliest summer of nineteen forty eight i doodled on a piece of paper about asking myself what would happen if one uranium rod were to catch fire and I didn't want much like the answer price realized that if an aluminium cartridge burst the uranium could burn and the powerful air cooling system would blow radioactive dust up the chimney there was nothing to stop radioactivity blowing out over C scale and beyond so I went to the next committee meeting and said that I think that it would be desirable to filter the air coming out of the chimney and it went down like an absolute lead balloon the Chairman leant back in the chair and said don't be so silly lad two tons of air got chimney every second Cantrell to that yeah and it was considered such a fatuous remark who doesn't even appear in the minutes of the meeting many thought filters would be an unnecessary delay but John cockcroft backed price and ordered massive concrete filters to bewitched 400 feet and attached to the top of the chimneys that is why the filters are known as cockroft follows at least they were the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident it was a warning for Hinton in white hall meeting the deadline for the bomb was more important than the safety of the reactor hinton never took any chances with safety because of this pressure that he was really having to work almost hand from hand to mouth but the shortcuts taken with safety would later haunt the man who built windscale in 1951 after five years of back-breaking work when scale was built just ten days behind schedule this is the wind scale reactor hung about what matters like galavan Milligan Hinton had achieved what many had thought was impossible in such a short time wind scale is unique it is science fiction intruding on our server lives and it is a very great producer of plutonium it was true when scale could produce plutonium just not enough for the bomb it was at the research laboratory at Harwell that scientists realized that the uranium cartridges weren't producing enough plutonium the only way for windscale to increase plutonium output was to heat the uranium even more and the only way to do that was to reduce the amount of aluminium casing around the uranium the problem was that the cartridges had been manufactured and were already inside the reactor then winds girls deputy general manager Tom to II came up with an answer Tom chewy was a most impressive character he was pretty young for his senior post he largely ranit us in canoes extremely dominant he'd got a finger on every part of the of the seitan was very full of energy he was a lively handsome man so bold features and a massive gorgeous auburn hair flowing back from his phone to he simply took the cartridges out and trimmed off some of the aluminium the fins this meant unloading the hundred and two tons clipping one-sixth of an inch of aluminium of every fin of which there were 14 on each of 36,000 fuel elements which meant we had to do about a half a million shins and one of our engineers devised a little machine whereby you could place this on a rack and turn it round and you made a stroke like that took your fin turn it round clicked another turnaround clipped another and we managed to get the whole half million fends off as I say and in three weeks it was a classic case of British make do and mend but it meant one of win scales safety features had been removed opinion at the reactor was split well were two schools of thought they were proud of the fact that they were producing plutonium at whatever the faster rate may be as hot [ __ ] meeting the targets that have been set for them and so on and so on and they were doing it in there indefinitely as they saw it was there's a national interest gung-ho Queen and country stuff you know there was another very significant group who were extremely concerned about the attitude towards the possible dangers from radiation absorbs all the warnings were ignored nothing was allowed to delay the production of plutonium and in August 1952 the first plutonium left windscale to become part of Britain's atom bomb I broke down the reaction vessel myself personally opened it up scrambled around amongst calcium fluoride see if i could find anything and there I found piece of plutonium about this size but the size of the fifty pence piece 132 grams and that was our very first piece it's all this vast industrial complex and six years of activity came down to 130 2 grams of the time Hinton had done his job now it was the turn of William penny seven years after helping the Americans build their bomb penny gathered his team for the crucial bomb tests in Australia the pressure was on penny Britain had a new prime minister the man who had invented the phrase special relationship Churchill was determined that Penny's atom bomb would restore Britain standing with the Americans never shall we lose our faith and courage and never shall prevail in ignorance and regard and the word work rounded on their permanent secretaries desk and ministry supply though two forms and one said hard luck dr. penny you know said congratulations sir william now to keep turning the city into position to fire now that lethal cloud rising about Montebello mux the achievement of British Science and Industry in the development of atomic power but it leaves unanswered the question how shall this newfound power be used the answer doesn't lie with Britain allure but we may have a greater voice in this great decision if we have the strength to defend ourselves and the deter aggression the bomb worked it was a triumph not just for penny but also for windscale Britain's bomb maker now sir william penny came home to a hero's welcome any cyber state has anything at all buy Montebello no not at all closed book yes have you anything else ableism the achievement of this group of people is inspiring it was a case of brain power and ability and we'll triumphing over meager resources and an austere climate and all sorts of political difficulties I would defy anybody to follow the the career of of Bill penny through this period or of of Christopher Hinton and not feel uplifted by what they did in the teeth of all sorts of difficulties armed with the atom bomb Churchill was sure he could persuade the Americans to reestablish the special relationship and Britain's place at the top table but within weeks of Britain's triumph Churchill learned that the Americans were in the Pacific with a new weapon the blast will come out of the horizon just about there and this is the significance of the moment this is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device if the reaction goes we're in the thermonuclear here for the sake of all of us and for the sake of our country I know that you join me in wishing this expedition well for face bursts it was a shock the trump card had been trumpeted were which wasn't supposed to happen America's hydrogen bomb could deliver a blast of a Megaton ten times the size of the British bomb I think but they realized very quickly then that Britain couldn't actually compete with the United States and probably couldn't compete with the Soviet Union ultimately in Congress leading senators spoke out against sharing their new nuclear secrets with Britain those nails now proposed and I'm sure the Congress would not be willing I don't know if even our allies would ask that information be given to them though respect to the mid mechanics of the weapon how it is made how it has put together that is too vital to our own national security to be disclosed to anybody an American senator said that a partnership with Britain would be like trading a horse for a rabbit but Churchill would not abandon his desire to see Britain and America as nuclear partners secretly he ordered penny to develop the hydrogen bomb in a sense that made the stakes higher for developing a hydrogen bomb this was something they had to do this was one thing they could do they had to do it the pressure was on and maybe if they could do that they would rebuild this partnership with it with the Americans it was a decision that would set windscale on the path to nuclear disaster building an h-bomb would require not just more plutonium but a new material called tritium but windscale had only been designed to make plutonium and the reactor had begun behaving unpredictably unknown to the operators a process was building up whereby the material the main material of the reactor was beginning to be different from from an ordinary construction material it was the graphite core that was causing alarm its temperature would suddenly increase dramatically the wind scale men concerned that the core could catch fire switched on the fans and blew the graphite core the radiation had caused the graphite to store up energy at any moment it could be released as heat and potentially start a fire so the scientists invented a procedure to control the release of stored energy called a Vic nuh release by heating the reactor too much higher temperatures the stored energy would be released gradually and the danger averted we were told that the graphite grew and by running it at a higher temperature for so long you released the energy in the graph hartnett return back to normal which is that was kind of a learning curve all this in fact everybody was on her learning curve that really from you know ground floor to the top level although the scientists were still on the learning curve Churchill now publicly committed Britain to the hydrogen bomb we have seen what the effects of an airburst atomic bomb heat radiation and blast might do to a typical British city let us now apply these effects to the population of that city these people are all killed in theory they have died three times over the public began to grow anxious about what the scientists were doing one of the sad things as you get this phrase or used to in those at the mud scientists and you probably have the idea of scientist my god they're going to end the world are going to blow it up and so it was never like that really was never like that but there were great pressures on the scientists to go faster they would have liked to have done we'd be legt beings do you remember your humanity and forget the rest you can do so whale eyes open to paradise and of their lies before you the risk of universal a seventeenth of October 1956 a new reactor called a halt open just yards from windscale this was the public face of nuclear science which would politicians hoped answer the growing concern about the work of the nuclear scientists today scientists engineers and statement from 40 different countries it was worthy of a royal unveiling Calder Hall was the first nuclear power station in the world the public were promised electricity that would be too cheap to meter anyhow that's just perfect as the Queen sent electricity into the National Grid what the watching public didn't know was the new reactor hadn't been built just to make electricity I believe there were times when he was taking electricity out of the grid ruffin Pompeia death it's always been a cover to some extent newtonian production it took the edge of the destructive aspects of the bomb which the government regardless good propaganda we were doing this because it's going to it's going to be positively good for the people not going to look them over we're going to get some electricity out of it secretly Col de Hall was helping windscale produce more of the material it needed to meet the demands of the bomb program different had got to make its mark and way to make its mark was not build a nuclear power station little NH problem as the world feted colder hall when scale was creaking under the new demands for the h-bomb the more modern called a halt was a closed system and couldn't blow radioactivity into the atmosphere but readings taken around windscale had produced alarming results Frank Leslie a windscale research scientist discovered high levels of radioactivity around C scale some of the radioactive cartridges had got stuck they become lodged in the back of the reactor bursting open the famous filters [ __ ] Roth's Follies had failed to prevent the radioactive dust being blown out over Cumbria but Leslie's warnings were kept quiet though it was known at the highest political level somebody up there also said it was to be kept secret and that had very unfortunate repercussions because again for reasons I don't know people in the research laboratories at windscale were not allowed to know about it then Britain's h-bomb project was hit by a new deadline world leaders had met in Geneva to sign up to a ban on nuclear bomb testing by 1958 Churchill knew that Britain was running out of time it had to be hurried because of the nuclear test ban treaty so there was that rather narrow moment of opportunity between us action hitting the ground not running very fast barely walking and and and the moment when it would come into force there could be no delays at winn scale the leaking cartridges were dealt with by more make do and mend people such as myself ready in the bottom of the chimney would go along the duct with a sort of shovel and push them back into the water duct so that there was no chance they would lie there and oxidize so that helped to reduce the problem Vic Goodwin was a 20 year old physics graduate who just arrived at windscale looking rather like a super version of a plastic Macintosh is a new suit designed for workers at Britain's atomic plants new recruits did get that kind of job one war kind of polythene suit I think one had an airline once you're inside and the Zips been fastened all that remains is to pump in compressed air so that the wearer can breathe easily well certainly had a rope rounds ones waist and a minder that was a very reliable man who would make sure that you didn't spend too long or Paul over into the canal it wasn't just unpleasant work it was dangerous he had to strip off as soon as you got there and put factor clothing on and then on the way home you all had to shower and then you could go right through and then click to close at the other end and come back in the clothes you went in but you never wore your outdoor clothes on the factory completely from head to toe they wouldn't even vests and Underpants and Sussex roll and shoes though he got scrubbed in the showers and they came home with bandages on the radiation dosage that were allowed to take them was much higher than it is today in fact i think if we took the same kind of dosages today the big question just in the houses of parliament they're doubles life then you know but with a test ban looming the politicians couldn't afford any more delays unless we do this very quickly unless we achieve this research breakthrough in hydrogen weapons then there will be a moratorium there will be an end of fissile production there will be a disarmament program which the Americans and the Russians had signed up to and we would be left behind if the test failed it could spell the end of British hopes for nuclear collaboration with America so we had to go straight from the design principles to engineering it to putting it in a bomber it was vital that windscale make the deadline and deliver penny the new material tritium it was a mountain for win scale to climb America's Atomic Energy Commission devoted huge resources to this task the Atomic Energy Commission control more assets and capital investment and scale of factories and so forth than the sixth largest United States corporations combined used something like one-tenth of all the electricity in the United States and so on and so on it was a truly monumental effort to make these very small amounts of material with these extraordinary properties and when scale was venturing into unknown scientific territory new cartridges were designed containing enriched uranium and lithium magnesium which could catch fire at high temperatures some of the senior scientists sounded the alarm they were putting things in which didn't look very nice from a safety point of view the pressure was such that and people except he precious then if a production told it had to be met it was rather like wartime you make it they were running much to another Christmas but the warning signs couldn't have come at a worse time for the government britains failed attempt to win back control of the Suez Canal had been a national humiliation the American President Eisenhower had refused to back the British action so is undoubtedly the lowest point in the post-war special relationship with the United States United States it effectively causes the withdrawal or Britain from the series operation itself Britain's new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was not prepared to accept that the debacle in Suez was proof that Britain was no longer a great power every nine again since the war I've heard people say isn't Britain only a second or third gas burner isn't she on the way out What nonsense this is a great country so don't let's be ashamed to say sir macmillan was convinced he could deliver what he called the great prize because of his friendship with the American president that a very close wartime relationship in North Africa they'd remain friends during the post-war period they knew each other very well they trusted each other in March 1957 Macmillan met Eisenhower in Bermuda he felt I think that his relationship with Eisenhower was so close the trust was so great that he could deliver what no other british prime minister had been able to deliver mcmillan urged his friend to convince Congress to share their nuclear secrets but he knew that Britain would have to prove it was America's nuclear equal America's h-bomb had produced a blast of a Megaton ten times the size of Britain's atom bomb Britain's h-bomb needed to be a Megaton somewhere along the line the magic Megaton be mentioned a vast military force gathered in the Pacific for the h-bomb tests the stakes were penny had never been higher the test in May and June 857 are politically very important indeed because there is this pressure for a moratorium on nuclear testing politicians really see an opportunity during this period to influence the Americans windscale had met its target delivering the tritium for the bomb and so developing a weapon system which appeared to have a Megaton yield was very important politically in this campaign of trying to reopen a collaboration with the United States but would Penny's h-bomb produce the magic Megaton it was an embarrassing failure the blast was nowhere near a Megaton it was barely bigger than the atom bomb of five years earlier but penny had a back-up plan another bone it was called orange Harold I thought orange hair was a stupid device it wasn't elegant yeah it couldn't be developed any further dead end design and it consumed an enormous amount of very expensive fissile material it's not what I would have recommended but I wasn't in charge it wasn't an h-bomb at all just a massive atom bomb they were convinced would produce a Megaton it needed huge quantities of plutonium and the magic ingredient tritium if you hoped to get a lot of big bangs you need a lot of tritium is as simple as that and so the demand for tritium on the places like windscale went up considerably as the orange herald test approached windscale was suddenly ordered to increase production of the new material tritium by five hundred percent five years before the scientists had increased production for the atom bomb by removing some of the aluminium cartridge to try to meet the demands for the h-bomb new aluminium cartridges had been made to house the uranium and lithium magnesium and once again some of the aluminium casing was then removed to boost production by increasing the heat of the reaction they also doubled the amount of lithium magnesium in the cartridges but some expressed alarm at the danger of a nuclear accident I would have said it was a reasonably green situation until the end of 55 and it was said it was orange in 56 and read from journey of the first it had put windscale under even greater strain but orange Harold was ready for the watching media won the flash cards you see it round you always can't look at it it sort of every rivet on the ship sort of lights up every bit of metal and then after that quite a long time after you get the blast so you see the thing that he immediately but you think oh well it's all over and suddenly you hit by LeBlanc and it's very impressive the government didn't tell the media orange Harold wasn't an h-bomb there was confusion and politicians fudge things by talking sometimes about an H bar and sometimes about a Megaton McMillan spin worked the Press reported that Britain had produced a Megaton h-bomb they'd helped from Megaton they got 800,000 kilotons but it was still a colossal blow there's a lot of press coverage and all of those tests which suggests that Britain has developed an h-bomb there is no desire to put the record straight at this particular time for largely political reasons but the Americans weren't deceived into thinking Britain was now they're equal scientists were trying to deliver they were disappointed in the results and so I think there must have been enormous anxiety in Whitehall at this time that may be given the pressures we wouldn't be in a position quickly to renew the collaboration which was the great prize as far as McMahon was concerned McMillan was undaunted he ordered penny to prepare another h-bomb test but when scale had already reached breaking point the problem is that there's nobody to say no weeks after orange Harold Christopher Hinton the man who led windscale through so much dramatically left he was utterly upset towards the end of his to with what had happened and he sort of had a semi nervous breakdown windscale had lost its bold bad baron just as the scientists were warning of impending disaster but McMillan's attention was elsewhere a bolt from a clear blue Soviet sky the Russians launched sputnik the world's first satellite suddenly America was vulnerable to a Soviet attack there was as much shock and fear about spit Nick as the United States felt with 911 such a precision strike I said we should've been approached wants to have it if they're such thing it gives the American people alarmed that a foreign country especially an enemy country can do this if we fear this one small satellite orbiting the Earth and yet a profound convulsion in American society as a result Macmillan seized his chance on the night of October the 10th 1957 he wrote to Eisenhower urging him to force Congress to accept Britain as America's nuclear ally but even as he wrote 300 miles north events were unfolding which could steal the great prize just as it was in his grasp if you're a fatalist or believe like the Greeks in the malign influence of the gods you could point to that we can say Bernie was extraordinary and the very evening my grandfather wrote to I my dear friend saying all the plans that he had that very evening the fire started a twin scalp three days earlier Vic Goodwin had turned up for his shift at the winds Gail control room the men monitoring the temperature gauges on the control panel had noticed that the reactor was heating up more than it should they ordered a vigna release this was the process they had come up with a few years earlier heating the graphite core had the effect of releasing any dangerous stored energy in the core once the energy was released the graphite would eventually cool down they done vigna releases before eight times if the vigna release worked Goodwin would see the temperature rising all across the core showing the stored energy was being released instead the temperatures were falling when they should have been rising the vigna release hadn't removed the stored energy except in one channel 2053 which did appear to be releasing its stored energy unlike the rest its temperature was rising by early Tuesday morning they faced a choice leaving the stored energy in the reactor wrist of fire heating the reactor further a second vigna release would raise the temperature of the core even higher the experienced people decided that it would be necessary to warm it up again which had been done in the past the second heating worked the temperatures rose in all the channels including 2053 the stored energy was being released now they had to make sure the temperatures didn't rise above the maximum allowed as they temperatures rose and on some thermocouples they were approaching 400 degree centigrade we allow more air to flow through the core in order to control the temperatures when scales air cooling system was turned on to cool the graphite call still further but by Thursday morning it was clear the reactor was behaving unpredictably I was rather puzzled because some areas that of the core which had been cooling on Wednesday were now heating up again Goodwin checked the radiation levels coming out of the chimney they were high high enough for him to believe a rogue uranium cartridge was the cause of the problem in my opinion we'd got a badly burst cartridge fuel element uranium fuel element as serious as a burst cartridge was the team had faced that situation before the problem was it wasn't a burst cartridge it was a fire inside channel 2053 the cartridges which had been redesigned to increase tritium output had caught fire the decision the year before to reduce the aluminium in the cartridges meant they could burn more easily the extra heating for the vigna release had caused them to burst and catch fire the accident the scientists had feared had finally happened but the men at windscale didn't know that they still thought it was just a burst cartridge that needed removing they decided to cool down the graphite core and turned on the fans to blow it cold it was a fateful decision it's like putting a match to piece of paper if I will spread along in trying to call the core they had fanned the flames of the fire causing it to spread throughout hundreds of channels the fire was soon burning out of control radioactivity pouring out of the chimney the activity in the chimney went up a lot and it became obvious that something was really a drift outside arriving for work Eddie Davis could already see signs of the fire I was walking down the road towards the pile and looked up at the chimney because we were responsible over the filters on the chimney and so this smoke coming out of the chimney in the control room all eyes were on the temperature gauges I came down and went into the control room again and by them quite a lot of people have gathered in there one of my colleagues came across just reading out graphic temperatures which were going up so this was clearly a dreadful the men knew this couldn't be a burst cartridge it could only mean the reactor was on fire so then I walked up onto the top of the pile and saw monitor up there and he said don't go into precipitator house because it's too hot there's too much radiation there was no emergency plan for dealing with a fire the men were on their own he just said been an incident and I said incident he said as I can't talk about it well I won't be coming home I'll let you know as time goes on everybody was very subdued and of course nobody knew what was going to happen or how to treat it the longer they did nothing the more the fire would burn and the more the radioactivity would pour out onto C scale if we carried on as we were there was the risk that the whole lot would burn and go up the chimney no official warning was given people in C scale went about as normal John was my baby and he was in a pram on the front lawn in the sunshine and he he ran up as it get John end and I said why I said just get him inside close all the windows closed all the doors don't go out and lock the hands up I won't be home tonight and that was it one man had been missing from the emergency a twin scale Tom tui I was at home when this happened and I got a phone call from the general manager we had a very brief conversation he said Tom pylons on fire I said good god you don't mean the call he said yes when you come in I said yes cover my car and went straight to the pile I could climb up 80 feet into the air no lift the respirator on my face and a bottle of air on my back to look down holes at the back of the reactor there were four inspection holes in the back and you could look down those and see what was happening well I looked down on to a blazing infer and it went through my mind that if the temperature exceeded 600 degrees centigrade the floor on which I was standing could collapse so what they met spirit literally that's it that's the thought went through my mind word started to get out in C scale I do believe that called a girls school closed because of the not immediately because of the parents worries about their children of course and I think some parents did come and take their children away immediately next thing was my daughter came flying in mommy mommy what's happening i said i don't know what he why are you here she said well we've all been sent home she said where's daddy i said is at work is it is she is he coming home I said he won't be coming home today why i said i don't know pet half the village vanished a lot of they they fathers of children and the husbands and wives must have been able to get through awesome but they immediately said get out get our gold I caught him of the Scotch around his gold coat just go and end with in overnight it was only half of his here I wasn't going to move as long as long as my husband was I was going to stop here this was a blazing Inferno and we knew it was pushing radioactive fission product up the chimney all the time and we didn't know what we could do to stop it in the first place the decision was taken I earth I'm sure it was the right thing to do to try to get shot of as much fuel from the core as possible the men began an operation to try to remove the burning cartridges from the core we were trying to to push the burning fuel through into the back of the reactor but the heat had melted the cartridges so they've become stuck inside the core they were forced to use scaffolding poles they'd found nearby to try and push the cartridges out radiation was so intense they could only work a few hours they were running out of firefighters the police from the factory had turned up looking for volunteers and the daughter boss and we decided the best way to get the volunteers was to go to the cinema and and volunteer the back two rows up the up the shore to go into the factory too as it turned out to help push the fuel rods out of the out of the reactor still on top of the reactor one man ignored the radiation Williams I decided as I didn't want somebody tapping me on the back say hey you know had too much I knew I had to be there until the damn thing was doing with no sign of the fire dying out tui began to think the unthinkable it was I eventually who found the general manager's office and say look I want to use water if they try to put the fire out with water the consequences could be catastrophic you didn't have to know the details about some steam coming out of some place rather to realize the potentiality for disaster and it's a control bomb really a nuclear bomb and saw the control bomb mankind had not faced anything like this ever before one it's not let me give you any advice you played by ear I was near him at the time and he said and you see that everybody in the idea is undercover round here which I did we dad r ich immer we'd add all these places where bombs were dropped in places and I thought we're only about two mile away if it goes up we will all go with it and I said ok till he gave the signal for the water to be turned on the pressure was too high so I had the pressure reducer least the water was then sinking down through the channels into the fire it's now you there was no explosion but the water wasn't putting out the fire to he had one last hope you had to keep the air on as long as you had men on the charge hoist across the best thing you possibly do is to be feeling a massive fire were there so i found a general manager Davey and said this waters having no thang but I propose to shut the arrow if turning the air off didn't work they had no means of putting out the fire you got this blazing Inferno with these flames belting out and hit in the back wall and how it goes off him just like that absolutely incredible the fire was out the people of windscale were saved to see that you've licked it huh move the fire disappear 11th well that was a marvelous really bubbly input in the reactor building would have being killed lot of people on the site but probably being killed the neighborhood would have been heavily contaminated land would probably not being used to this day I was so pleased to see him home because I I honestly didn't think I was going to do but to even thinking about it upsets me because I have never been so frightened in my whole life the Atomic Energy Authority have announced that some uranium cartridges in the center of the atomic pilot windscale became overheated yesterday the authority have said that staff are now reducing the temperature of the pile with water at the moment a northeast wind is blowing across the wind scale factory and is taking any radioactive dust or vapor out to sea in fact it had been turning the air off not the water which had put out the fire and many believed the wind was blowing the radioactivity inland well my impression was that it was blowing a bit eastward which would probably be heading more towards school fell you know I'm particular time the immediate concern appeared to be contaminated milk and the risk that babies could develop thyroid cancer the government ordered all the milk produced for miles around to be poured away emergency a twin scale Adam flood and the milk from 200 square miles of farmland is condemned as radioactive but for these filter tops once nicknamed [ __ ] Roth's funny because Sir John Cockroft insisted on them farms much father away with a faced not emergency but disaster the farmers carry on as usual for cows have to be built whatever happens to the milk afterwards you can't explain radioactivity to account yes well I mean they had to demonstrate how concerned they were one for public relations they are concern the wonderful graph now the worst seems to be over now mr. Stan Ritson who helped to bring wind scales overheated reactor under control was radioactive for four days and couldn't even kiss his wife till the Geiger counters gave permission the press hailed the windscale man as heroes but within days the men who had fought the fire would be fighting to clear their names as windscale became part of a political cover up for Macmillan the fire at windscale was a major embarrassment he was only days away from a meeting where President Eisenhower would announce that Britain was fit to be America's nuclear ally McMillan ordered a closed inquiry under Sir William penny the man who had led Britain's bomb project six days after putting out the fire the windscale men were called in one by one to account for their actions the evidence they gave was deemed so sensitive that only now for the first time can the tapes be heard in a room just yards from where the fire had raged so William penny open proceedings to investigate into the cause of the accident that window and the measures taken to deal with it and its consequences now we've always got would you be good enough to say what your job is the impression that I've retained is going into room and seeing this very large man plenty was a big man but extremely pleasant courteous and thoughtful and very polite indeed for nine days they gave their evidence they were truly exhausted and they were all worried to death and both for themselves and for the plant and really been a dreadful experience for them and you can hear each and Evan the voices of many of them at first they said if it went over 1,200 or god help us when it kept on creeping up it was quite frightening just not to know what might happen I was called in and I remember they wrote up on the backboard a list of things that they wanted to know things have had to be investigated pronto quick as the evidence mounted the role of the new cartridges introduced for the h-bomb became central that is the question sir anything was to run and tell us about isotope captures dangerous various different things are being cooked up in the reactant not just uranium you see because they were also making material for tritium for the for the for the thermal nuclear bomb hydrogen bomb as well in there but the tritium certainly was a critical one some of the men told penny that they believed the new lycium magnesium cartridges had started the fire analysis started thanking with very clear indication of what sequence of events ones what is the sequence can get am cartridge which will perforated it will burn if it burns a temperature in the channel will rise separate hundred degree centigrade and again I would have thought the crap i think i might they won't burn under those conditions yes thank you very much i consider other questions that which one penny began to focus on another possible cause he asked if the decision to have a second nuclear heating or vigna release had been a mistake you decide that you couldn't quite remember whether it was you or not the full of second-tier preheating you work that was the right decision yes we've done this re eating several times before no seriously look at the men were adamant that they haven't caused the fire they'd followed the tried-and-tested procedure as penny was conducting his inquiry Macmillan traveled to Washington to claim his great prize the one result of the Washington talks is that Britain and America will cooperate more closely in nuclear science it was a historic moment which would redefine the relationship between their two nations Macmillan and Eisenhower declared that Britain and America would now be nuclear partners my grandfather was absolutely over the moon when they went back to the embassy they did crack open a bottle of champagne to celebrate but when Macmillan returned to Britain Penny's report was on his desk it showed that the political demand for a Megaton bomb had fueled the fire a twin scale you can imagine bottom dropping Adam like melons stomach saying is this some is this another disaster that's going to rob us of this great prize as he called it of American cooperation the wind scale fire threatened to wreck everything he and his predecessors had been striving for that night he wrote how are we to deal with Sir William Penny's report to publish it to the world especially the Americans might put in jeopardy our chance of getting Congress to agree to the president's proposal mcmillan ordered that all copies of the penny report be recalled they didn't want to look like a bunch of amateurs and the wind scale fire certainly threatened to do them this was the first really big nuclear accident but windscale wouldn't just disappear Frank Leslie who two years before had discovered radiation leaks this time went to the press he told him the fire had caused another leak he was by no means unrepresentative know what there was there were plenty people also felt like him that really the industry needed to really pull it sucks up and get a lot more concerned about safety issues particularly radiation safety issues than it had add up to that time being mcmillan dismiss Leslie as an opinionated ass more difficult to ignore were the voices emerging from America one senator clinton anderson accused britain of not telling the truth about wind scale at stake Macmillan believed with the future of Britain's relationship with America the full story of wind scale could not be revealed it had to be covered up the report could not be published when it then came to be explained to the country my grandfather realized how important it was going to be to reassure people and so he covered it up very simple Macmillan turned once more to William Penny's report into the fire although penny accepted that the cartridges had spread the fire he believed that the winds gale team themselves had been the primary cause of the accident because they had started the second nuclear heating too soon and too rapidly this had been the moment on October the eighth two days before the fire was discovered when the wind scale team reheated the reactor the second vigna release I don't believe that they sang nuclear heating did contribute to the fire in any way shape or form except that it evidently got they released going again and it was during the second phase if you like is a release that the fire started but I don't believe that the SEC nutri heating initiated the fire in any way but Penny's conclusion gave Macmillan the opportunity he was looking for a white paper was published it left out much of the detail of pennies report but inserted a phrase which penny have not used the fire at windscale had been caused by an error of judgment by the wind scale men so my grandfather as a fine editor of books edited the report in such a way that he was then able to lay something on the table as if it was a relatively minor thing most politicians then regarded the wind scale far rather as their minds were going a minor accident in a colliery happily the chaps got out you know that sort of thing he really suggested the operators were a bit fallible and their judgment wasn't terribly good and the press latched onto it and so that was a very bad week for the operators there the reaction meant was very very bitter because they felt that the blame which was not theirs had been by implication loaded onto they and they'd be made to look as though they didn't know what they were doing and did not you known it was all their fault on the day the white paper was published Britain detonated a genuine megaton hydrogen bomb it was a personal triumph for penny he wrote to his team in the Pacific glad you got it off on Friday this took some of the sting out of wind scale I expect to get to Washington on Sunday penny flew to Washington to take part in the first exchange of nuclear secrets with America since the war they had a delicate and frosty first encounter in which nobody quite knew how much they were supposed to reveal and that after this the British thought well is this worth it you know they were going to tell us anything and they decided right we'll just put our cards on the table we'll show them what we've done and they went back into the room and revealed a full design and the Americans then left the room and had a 10-minute powwow and they came back in and said well gentlemen it's clear that the laws of physics apply and Britain in the same way that they do in the United States yes I think the British were able to make a contribution and the Americans benefit to a certain extent but of course the benefit to Great Britain is is remarkable here we have access not to all American nuclear secrets but to a very substantial range of nuclear technology nucleus nuclear secrets and for one power to share with another state those kinds of secrets which there are the forefront of its military security i think is quite remarkable McMillan had secured Britain's place at the top table but for the men who diverted a tragedy a twin scale it came at a great cost so William what caused the accident was it a failure of man ought of gear it was birth there was an error of judgment during a standard operation on the pile called the vigna release but the world inadequacies of instrumentation which prevented the operators from being able to form a really reliable judgment error of judgement the men who'd prevented a tragedy were now officially to blame for the fire the fact that they seem to be blaming people for what they did and the wrong people of that I think is was very bad but we were resentful at the time and I said think was absolutely disgraceful wrong and then cast the blame Junior people who had no means of defending themselves it's like putting a cake in an oven if you haven't made the cake you know if it doesn't come out right it's not not your fault and that's how I thought about it but the people of windscale were perhaps the first to realize that a new britain was emerging the trust between leaders scientists and Men which had been forged in wartime had begun to disappear most of the people on this site had been in the services as had I they were all accustomed to doing their best and they rather expected a pat on the back now and there and I think it came as a terrible shock when they were held up in the press as being you know inadequate and that attitude lives on a now 50 years later months later the Americans visited windscale they met senior managers there who described what had happened the previous October they all held forth as though they fought the fire and I was sitting there not a single question was put to me the man who dealt with the situation how do you feel about well I fur well I haploid you want me to be I thought what a shower a bastard newsnight's next on bc2 then as pumped the why democracy season a gripping investigation into torture methods used in Afghanistan Iraq and Guantanamo Bay taxi to the dark side at eleven-twenty I feel just like polly I should worry

Channel: Kathy Reed

Views: 353,744

Rating: 4.6682615 out of 5

Keywords: Windscale, Great Britian, England National Football Team (Football Team), Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Reactor Accident, Radiation Contamination, Radiation Exposure, Political Spin

Id: x_pWgRx7lno

Length: 87min 58sec (5278 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 19 2014