Windscale: The British Chernobyl

this video is brought to you by squarespace whether it's a new year's resolution or a lifelong passion start your journey to website glory with squarespace check out their wonderful all-in-one platform through the link in the description below more on them in a bit on april 26 1986 the world witnessed its worst ever nuclear accident in the far north of ukraine reactor number four the chernobyl plant overheated resulting in an explosion and the unleashing of clouds of deadly isotopes into the atmosphere radiation fell across europe thousands of square kilometers of land were rendered permanently uninhabitable but what if chernobyl was only the second worst nuclear accident on record what if 30 years earlier there had been a similar catastrophe in western europe that had poisoned uncountable numbers if you think that sounds far-fetched well just know that it really happened in october of 1957 a fire at the windscale facility in northern england came within a hare's breadth of disaster for 30 hours flames raged in the reactor spewing deadly radioactive clouds into the sky although the fire was eventually brought under control it came close to an explosion that could have killed thousands and left the lake district an irradiated wasteland that it didn't is down to a handful of people whose names are almost forgotten today geographic is travelling back to witness a disaster that nearly became the british chernobyl on the edge of britain's storied lake district sits one of the most contaminated sites in europe known today as cellarfield it's a local icon a place that provides thousands of jobs but not so long ago sellerfield was known under a different name one with far darker connotations windscale it was under this name that the plants suffered the worst nuclear disaster in western european history the story of windscale begins in the darkest days of world war ii during the blitz when german bombers rained death down nightly on british cities munitions production had to be moved as far west as possible out of the luftwaffe's range among the sites chosen was low sellafield an agricultural area inhabited since 1611 low sellafield consisted of seven small farms dotted over a wide region these were soon knocked down replaced by a vast tnt production plant to supply the war effort but it wasn't thanks to any local research that sellerfield's fate was sealed but top secret projects that were taking place thousands of kilometers away tube alloys was the joint british canadian program to manufacture the world's first atomic bomb started before the much more famous manhattan project tube alloys was eventually folded into its american cousin in 1943 under the quebec agreement this meant a whole lot of british expertise being used at los alamos giving london an expectation that washington would share any new discoveries with them in 1944 winston churchill even signed a secret agreement with fdr to combine future atomic research after the war was won so you can imagine how the british felt when the war ended not with a new era of cooperation but with harry truman signing the mcmahon act and banning american scientists from passing nuclear secrets on to any other nation from london's perspective this wasn't just rude it was outright theft as far as white was concerned without british expertise there would be no atom bomb this was simply objective fact like day following night or joseph joestar being the best jojo still always not lost having so many scientists at los alamos meant that the brits could make a decent stab at building their own bomb in january of 1947 mere months after truman metaphorically flipped london the bird british prime minister clement atley signed off on a project known as high explosive research the aim was to create a bomb just like the one dropped on nagasaki that meant quickly setting up a facility for producing plutonium the site chosen was a wartime tnt factory known as sellafield that same year it was renamed windscale the site was soon overrun with workers and scientists all dedicated to building a working nuclear facility in the shortest time possible it was a dizzying feat in no time at all two reactors with tall chimneys known as pile 1 and pile 2 had been created from scratch along with reprocessing plants and storage ponds it helped that britain wasn't the only country dashing for the bomb in the summer of 1949 the ussr tested its first atomic device ending the era of american nuclear supremacy with the cold war already plunging temperatures across europe the race was on for britain to secure its own deterrent in 1950 windscale's first reactor went critical it was the dawning of a new era one in which britain would briefly be near the forefront of nuclear power and weapons research it was also the first step along a short and glowing path towards catastrophe you know how sometimes a big old catastrophe happens and afterwards everyone's all like hey remember that guy who kept warning us about this probably should have listened to him well in windscale's case that guy was called john cockroft chief engineer on the project cockroft was an insanely brainly dude who jointly won the nobel prize for helping split the atom however he was also considered by windscale's builders to be an outsider stepping on their turf so when coccraft rocked up to the site and suddenly decided the dale chimneys needed filters he more or less got told precisely which orifice he could insert his ideas into by now the chimneys were basically complete installing filters would mean placing them at the top rather than the bottom which would have been a pain in the ass take ages and be super super expensive the onsite engineers pushed back so hard that the filters nearly didn't happen and here we get our first peek into the parallel universe where windscale is as infamous as chernobyl in this parallel universe the engineers won the filters weren't installed and when the fire broke out they weren't there to stop 90 of the material released from making it into the atmosphere in this parallel universe whole swaths of cumbria are uninhabitable and john cockroft is just that guy we all wish we'd listened to thankfully that isn't our universe here in our prime timeline coccraft was able to be like guys i split the goddamn atom if i say filters we're having filters all right but while the engineers obeyed they still nicknamed the filters cockroft's follies it would take until 1957 before events wiped the smug grins off their faces by 1951 work at windscale was going so well that the newly re-elected winston churchill started searching for a test site since the americans were still in there i'm not playing with euphase he turned to the australians and that's how the test site for britain's first atomic bomb wound up being on the other side of the world at trimuel island operation hurricane took place on october 3rd 1952 the new british bomb was placed aboard the hms plim and detonated vaporizing the ship in a gigantic cloud of mud and steam as the uk became only the third country to join the nuclear club expectations ran high in london that this would change washington's mind they thought the british scientists would be welcomed back into the usa's nuclear projects with open arms but alas this was not to be less than a month after churchill showed off his new toy truman unveiled a weapon that made hurricane look like a knockoff atari placed beside an xbox one ivy mike was the world's first hydrogen bomb with a staggering yield of 10.4 megatons mike was thousands of times more powerful than its british counterpart just like that london's dreams of being on a par with washington crumbled into dust so work continued at windscale work that would eventually see britain develop both its own hydrogen bomb and the world's first full-scale nuclear power station it was work that would also take the uk to the brink of disaster and we'll get back to that impending disaster in england in just a moment but first a word from today's fantastic video sponsor squarespace look it's a new year so whatever that new thing you're thinking about doing is well it's time to do it with squarespace are you looking to get in and out quick with a website design not thinking too much about it well bam use one of their beautiful templates to create a website that is fresh and for you but basically already made you just tweak a few things it looks completely different it's super easy or maybe you're more of a hands-on person you've got lots of opinions and ideas about what exactly your site should look like well squarespace gives you all of the customization options you could ever want with no updates no patches no technical bs to worry about once you're done setting up your website tinkering with the design if you're so inclined or maybe just playing around with the colors there are so many extra features that squarespace provides so that your website can thrive email campaigns patronage portals social integrations member-only areas analytics commercial options 24 7 customer support the list goes on and it is lengthy it's everything you could ever want in one place and look this isn't just another advertiser partnership for me when i launched a website for one of our other channels megaprojectsmegaprojects.net by the way i went to squarespace i made the website super easy i think it's very functional it's good looking i didn't have any web skills but like i say it was easy so when you're ready to get started on your next project big or small if it involves a website it's got to be with squarespace right now you can go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash geographics to save 10 of your first purchase of a website or a domain and let's get back to windscale right until disaster struck windscale seemed destined to go down in history not as a cautionary tale but as a place of impressive firsts in august 1956 the onside power station called a hall was switched on by the queen it was the first time in history a nuclear station had provided heat light and power for an entire town it also meant windscale's par 1 and pil2 reactors were now effectively obsolete although calder hall was primarily designed for civilian uses it also generated plutonium for use in weapons that meant that par 1 and par 2 could have been switched off then and there switched off and forgotten about as britain marched into the atomic age but that didn't happen and it was a massive oversight because even as early as 1956 it was clear the reactors weren't fit for purpose designed to last a mere five years they had already surpassed their shutoff dates they'd also been built in a hurry something you don't usually want to do with nuclear reactors as an engineer present on the day of the accident would tell the telegraph many years later the design was dodgy from the start yet the windscale disaster wouldn't unfold all at once like chernobyl but slowly over several days the first sign something was off came on monday october 7th 1957. that day pile 1 was activated for a routine procedure but people soon noticed the fuel was both cooler than it should be and warming much slower like its sibling pile 1 was a graphite reactor with 2 000 tons of the stuff lying at its core all surrounded by an attack on titan-sized concrete wall when the fuel was spent it was pushed out of one of the parlo's 3000-plus fuel channels at least that was the plan but as they say the best-laid plans of mice and nuclear technicians by october the 8th pile 1 slow heating was worrying some so more heat was applied making the temperature spike again this wasn't anything to worry about just a little anomaly the sort of thing that makes you go interesting and then move on come the night of october the 9th the core temperature had hit 400 degrees celsius that evening would be the last time any of winds girls scientists got any sleep for the next three days the day of the accident october the 10th 1957 dawned just like any other hundreds of people were on site at windscale doing everything from solving complex problems to serving lunch it wasn't until midday that anyone clocked the problems mounting up in pile 1. the temperature was shooting up more air was ordered to be drawn in to cool it but instead a single reading surged upwards at the same time radiation sensors in the chimney started going wild worried management sent some workers into the reactor to find the problem but rather than finding the problem singular they found problems plural multiple fuel channels were growing red burning up when the workers tried to push them out the pile as per the plan they instead jammed in place unable to be removed by 8 pm the channels were no longer merely glowing they were on fire windscale's workers were facing an unprecedented problem one the short history of nuclear physics hadn't given them time to prepare for the order was sent out to get some water on the flames but first hoses had to be found that could be dragged atop pile 1 and aimed into the burning reactor below by the time they were ready someone noticed that the fire had probably now exceeded 1 300 celsius and this was a massive problem rather than douse the flames the water instead might break down triggering a gigantic explosion right in the heart of par one if that happened well all bets were off already a cloud of radioactive material was escaping out of the tall chimney vast and deadly drifting across the skies above sleeping northern england cockroft's filters were trapping 90 of the material released but what made it out was still enough to cause a major incident what windscale's managers needed right now was time time to come up with a workable solution to the escalating problem sadly time was the one thing they no longer had the morning of october the 11th 1957 was a strange one for windscale's workers although a site emergency had been declared they were still expected to show up there was no evacuation no handing out of iodine pills nothing to suggest that anything was wrong by now plenty of them knew about the unfolding disaster knew that a team had worked all night trying to cool par 1 using carbon dioxide knew too but this had failed that 11 tons of uranium were now on fire spewing contamination across the british countryside yet this was the era of keep calm and carry on of stiff upper lips and close your eyes and think of england windscale's workers were employed by the government and the government damn well expected them to come to work it's chilling to think i would be talking about this back in our parallel universe we read about chernobyl today and rightly slap off all hits in disbelief at the soviet authorities covering up the meltdown and allowing kids to play outside as radioactive dust was falling yet the same stupidity was taking place here in 1950s britain people were expected to not only run away from the burning par one but actually come closer to it to report for duty ready to be killed if the reactor exploded the only reason many of these people didn't die may well be due to one man tom tui born in november 1917 to irish stock tui was like cockroft one of the unsung heroes of the british atomic program involved since world war ii had been present when winscal produced its first piece of usable plutonium now windscale's deputy works manager tui was naturally on site when the fire broke out thankfully he'd brought with him to work that day his gigantic balls of steel tui was the one who scaled pile 1 to get a good look in to see what was happening it was an act which exposed him to a crazy dose of radiation but it also allowed everyone to formulate a plan based on his report it was a mad plan a potentially dangerous plan that might kill them all they were going to try dowsing the flames with water as tui would later tell the official inquiry we were quite honestly frightened of the water because we didn't know whether there would be an explosion or not at the time though with a disaster underway he simply volunteered to scale the reactor again and feed the hoses down into the hole at 8 55 am some anonymous person offered up a prayer and switched the hoses on it was the first time water had ever been used on a reactive fire for all anyone knew that surge of h2o would be followed by a lightning fast process in which the o was stripped out and the h mixed with incoming air and an explosion was triggered that would permanently irradiate this corner of england thankfully that prediction turned out to be wrong over the next few hours tui scrambled up and down reporting each time that the fire was shrinking a move which earned him massive but thankfully non-fatal doses of radiation by midday the flames had been extinguished 30 hours later in the middle of the day on saturday the 12th of october 1957 the hoses were switched off for the first time in three days pile one fell silent at which point presumably everyone at windscale let out a gigantic sigh of relief it was over well almost the fire had spread radioactive isotopes far and wide across both england and the rest of europe enough had been released that the government imposed a ban on milk sales across cumbria for several weeks just in case of contamination but even this intervention wasn't enough to save everyone in the long run it's estimated the windscale fire caused about 200 excess cancer deaths compared to the overall number of cancer deaths in the uk this is tiny it's not even a statistical blip but to think that way would be to miss the point often on this channel we cover soviet tragedies such as the sverdlavos anthrax league in which anthrax spores escaped to russian bio lab and killed over 100 people when we research these accidents the tone is always the same shock and head shaking or that the soviets could have inflicted this on their own people and yet here we are talking about a western accident that a western government tried to cover up and that killed almost twice as many people as soviet anthrax ever did we don't want to stray too far into false equivalence with this the soviet union was a brutal dictatorship that locked its own people in gulags and killed millions something britain manifestly didn't do but still it's interesting to imagine another world one in which the cold war ended not with communism's defeat but its victory a world in which we read about disasters like wind scale and shake our heads in awe at how the british could have ever inflicted this on their own people [Music] in the immediate aftermath of the fire the british government tried its best to downplay the disaster underestimating the amount of dangerous material released by nearly a half yet even this version of events was still enough for windscale to earn the dubious honor of being the world's worst nuclear accident prior to chernobyl well sort of just two weeks before the windscale fire an underground tank containing radioactive waste had overheated and exploded outside russia's secretive city 40. the kishkiem disaster was even worse than windscale ultimately causing perhaps three or four times as many deaths but since the western world wouldn't learn about it until after chernobyl it was windscale that became the poster boy for anti-nuclear feeling not that windscale post 1957 was the same place as before in the wake of the fire both par-1 and pile 2 were decommissioned and power generation left to a new breed of reactors built to higher safety standards new and stricter regulations for nuclear power came into force in britain designed to ensure against another wind scale in 1981 the plant's name was even changed back to cellar field in a bid to banish the nuclear ghosts that still haunted its reputation yet this wouldn't be the end of the story of the site's contamination in the 1970s the windscale complex began building something known as thorp short for the thermal oxide reprocessing plant thorpe was built as a place for handling nuclear waste from across britain and europe the plan was that it would extract fuel from this waste that could be used in a new type of reactor called a fast breeder unfortunately fast breeders failed to take off thorpe proved less good at reprocessing than anyone had intended and instead the plant became a kind of continental nuclear dumping ground today thorpe which ceased operations in 2018 contains some of the most contaminated places in the whole of europe the room for extracting and dissolving nuclear fuel rods in acid has a radiation level of 280 sieverts per hour by way of comparison just five sieverts qualifies as a lethal dose for humans so yeah windscale today not exactly the safest place on planet earth with the site still so contaminated in so many places it's estimated it will take until between 2075 and 2095 to make it safe enough to demolish but even then thorpe will leave behind a legacy of contamination at sellerfield in the form of steel drums filled with high level waste the contents of these drums won't be safe for thousands upon thousands of years how to store them safely until then is anybody's guess so that then is the story of windscale a place that did so much to advance research on atomic weapons and civilian power but also produced one of history's worst nuclear accidents and it leaves behind an ugly legacy of contamination and yet things could have been so much worse although the windscale fire was a disaster it's worth pointing out that it didn't come within spitting distance of fukushima or chernobyl chernobyl in particular released over a thousand times more radioactive material than wind scale with effects that will still be felt thousands of years from now but while windscale was a relatively minor accident as these things go that's only because we're very lucky imagine for a second how things would have turned out if john carcraft had lost the argument about installing filters imagine if tom tui hadn't been willing to expose himself to high levels of radiation to get water onto the parwan fire or if the water had gotten in but caused an almighty explosion if any of those things had come to pass we'd be living in a very different world one in which the windscale exclusion zone would forever keep people from living in one of england's most beautiful regions in which the ruins of par one would be viewed as we now view chernobyl's reactor number four it's great that this isn't the world we live in it's great that in real life windscale was just another mid-level accident but it's also a warning one not about nuclear power specifically but about what can happen when governments mess around with things they don't understand be they weapons or viruses or nuclear reactors we may like to believe that those in charge always know what they're doing the story of the windscale fire and the disaster that almost was tells us we should believe otherwise so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 351,584

Rating: 4.9311008 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: rAvs4cwYbN0

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021