How ‘Britain’s Chernobyl’ nearly turned the north into a nuclear wasteland
If the 1,300°C fire in front of them wasn’t bad enough, the workers knew that any mistake could turn northwest England into a nuclear wasteland.
For days, no one at Windscale, a nuclear plant on the coast of Cumbria, knew that one of the site’s two plutonium-producing reactors was on fire.
Of course the uranium inside wasn’t ablaze, they thought, it was probably a minor malfunction at worst at the plant just north of Liverpool.
On October 10, 1957, a fire was discovered in reactor one, which manufactured plutonium for atomic weapons and powered homes.
A steam explosion was imminent, and plant workers threw on radiation suits to push the fuel rods out of the air-cooled graphite reactor. Water barely contained the inferno, and it was only once the air was cut off in the reactor room did the three-day blaze finally end.
Radioactive material, including cancer-causing iodine-131, was nevertheless spewed across the UK and Europe.
Until the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the Windscale fire was one of the worst nuclear accidents in history and remains the worst in Britain.
For decades, government officials did everything to suppress all the details of the accident – even shredding papers that laid the blame on staff misjudgments, poor organisation and shoddy safety instruments.
Built in the 1940s, Windscale was fuelled by the paranoia that gripped the US and Russia amid the Cold War as a major step in developing Britain’s nuclear weapons capability.
Keeping up with the US was key, the British government believed, to prevent – and survive – Soviet aggression.
‘It was about proving Britain’s enduring ability to remain a world power – one not to be messed with, and capable and worthy of nuclear collaboration with the Americans,’ wrote Phoebe Russell, of Keele University.
Engineers knew more than anyone how much the government wanted this; the deadline was to get it up and running by 1952. In the world of building a complex nuclear reactor, that’s quite a short deadline.
They managed it, and the first fuel rods were sent in January of that year and, by August, enough plutonium to pack a nuke was made, being used in the country’s first nuclear device.
Corners, however, had to be cut. Rather than the standard water-cooling system, the Windscale piles were kept cool with air, a small-sounding change that would actually have easily led to radioactive air being blown out.
Scientist John Cockcroft insisted – repeatedly – that filters be installed in the two towers to stop this. The then director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, a research authority, would get his wish. Well, kind of.
Placed atop the two 360-foot high chimneys, rather than the base, the filters were nicknamed ‘Cockcroft’s Follies’ by engineers, who saw the tech as overpriced and pointless.
These filters, however, would save countless lives. On October 8, an aluminium canister burst inside pile one – something that technicians were all too used to as they carried out routine heating.
But the worst-case scenario happened as the adjacent uranium cartridges burst too, releasing the uranium into the air.
Plant staff, however, had no clue this had happened. To cool down the pile, which had reached 400°C, they pumped more air into it. In other words, speeding up these cooling fans quite literally fanned the flames.
Ready to clock in for a shift, a Windscale foreman noticed smoke billowing out of the chimney. Fearing a fire, operators later realised the fuel inside the reactor was red hot.
‘An inspection plug was taken out,’ the facility’s manager, Tom Hughes, would recall in an interview.
‘And we saw, to our complete horror, four channels of fuel glowing bright cherry red.’
Hughes scaled the 80-foot ladder to reach the top of the tower, risking being contaminated by the radioactive material oozing out of it. Looking inside, all he could see was a dull red glow of the fuel rods.
Crews did everything to contain the fire – buckets of water, pumping carbon dioxide to eat up the oxygen and even pushing out any fuel cartridges using scaffolding poles. Nothing worked.
Hughes then had an idea. Evacuating the entire building, leaving only him and the fire chief, he shut off all air flowing into the reactor.
‘First the flames went, then the flames reduced and the glow began to die down,’ he said. ‘I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out. I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully.
‘But if you’re staring straight at the core of a shut-down reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.’
Hughes would live until he was 90.
No injuries were reported over the fire, but up to 240 people are thought to have developed thyroid cancer due to the radioactive material that escaped, of which all may have been fatal.
A 1987 study by the Medical Research Council said children born in Seascale, near the plant, were nine times more likely to die of blood cancer.
All livestock within 310 square miles were slaughtered – about 800 farms were affected. Gallons upon gallons of milk had to be dumped after it was found to be dangerously contaminated. Sales of milk within a 200-mile radius of the plant were banned.
‘This was all a high price to pay for political bragging rights and the salvaging of a nuclear relationship with the US’, wrote Russell.
On the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the Windscale fire is considered a level five ‘accident with wider consequences’. (Chernobyl is two ranks higher, classed as a ‘major accident’.)
‘Despite the major differences in the political systems of their countries of origin, the factors that led to the Windscale fire were not dissimilar from that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union,’ added Russell.
‘Both factories were operating with a lack of support; pressure for fast results; and with safety risks built into the reactors from their construction as a means of saving time and money.’
But the extent of these ‘consequences’ was covered by then-prime Harold Macmillan, according to classified documents released in the late 1980s.
The Conservative Party leader, fearing the blaze would threaten Britain’s nuclear ties with the US, ordered a report by a leading scientist that listed the failings that led to the accident be withheld. Any extra copies, he said according to a letter from his office stamped ‘top secret’, were to be shredded.
Macmillan would stress that revealing the details of the disaster would put national secrets on the line. Details that wouldn’t even be known to the National Radiological Protection Board until 1986.
The clean-up of the site began the following year, with the first step being removing the top of the chimneys above both reactors and sealing them shut.
Announcing the clean up John Collier, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority. He expected the decommissioning effort to take about 10 years, but will likely stretch well into the 2040s.
Give or take, that would be about 100 years after the plant, now called Sellafield, was first built. At the time, the two reactors ‘represented a great technical achievement by all concerned’, Collier said.
To people like Russell, the legacy of ‘Britain’s Chernobyl’ has become nothing more than a finger-pointing blame game.
‘Ultimately, the only misjudgement at Windscale,’ she said, ‘was that of the government’s for believing that they could push a nuclear reactor to its limits without consequences.’
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