To this point in history, the biggest accident from a nuclear reactor was undoubtedly Chernobyl.
It very goddamn nearly wasn’t.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Windscale Fire.
Britain and the US are like two old timers who know each other from the war. Lotta great stories, won some hard fought battles together, and if you attack one, the other will fucking fight you. But sit them down together during peacetime? They’ll find clever and inventive ways to fuck with each other.
The US and Great Britain worked together during WWII to develop nuclear capabilities. Churchill and FDR agreed that not only would the bomb be developed under the “utmost secrecy” with “full collaboration” through the war, but the two nations would continue toiling away together after the war.
Before that could happen, FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
The war ended just five months later. The US had a nuke, Britain didn’t, and Churchill was like “hey, President Truman, some nuclear secrets please and thank you?”
Truman was like “oh, nuclear secrets? Yeah Frank never said shit about that lol byeee.” To be fair, when they said “utmost secrecy,” they didn’t even tell the VP about the nuclear bomb. Can you imagine finding out all at once that the president died, you’re president now, oh and by the way we have nukes? Yikes. He signed the McMahon act, forbidding our nuclear scientists from sharing state secrets.
This was seen by the UK as little more than theft. Their top scientists’ war efforts were property of the US government now. They did the only responsible thing: stormed off to northern England and started smashing atoms all by their lonesome.
British scientists were recruited to replicate the work they’d done for the US at Windscale, the new British nuclear facility in Cumbria. Their first reactor, Pile 1, was online by autumn of 1950, followed by Pile 2 in early summer of 1951. Behold, locally sourced plutonium.
There are various mechanisms used to keep nuclear reactors in check, and one important thing is keeping the temperature stable. The heat from nuclear reactors is commonly cooled with water, but nuclear fuckery can overheat quickly if your access to water is disrupted. At Windscale, to avoid the potential for an accident in the event of their water supply being cut off somehow, they decided not to use water at all. Cooling would be handled by giant fucking fans.
Y’all, these were nuclear physicists.
We also used to think “just blow on it” was good advice for Nintendo cartridges, so.
The accident feels like it could have either been unbelievably worse or avoided entirely. Physicist Terrence Price knew that uranium, if it overheated in the reactor, could catch fire. Uranium was encased in aluminum fuel canisters, but in the event that one of them broke, the fans would blow radioactive materials out the chimney. Price was like “maybe add some filters?”
To which the engineers replied “we gave you fans to keep the place cool, maybe just wear a mask, snowflake.”
Then, Sir John Cockroft warned them. He’d won the nobel prize for splitting a fucking atom and was like “filters. Now. Don’t make me get the Nobel out.” Engineers were super fucking annoyed because you can’t say no to a Sir, pretty sure that’s a law in England.
They named the filters “Cockroft’s Folly,” because fuck that guy. Nobel prize winner, what in the ass does he know?
“Good” news: the UK’s Operation Hurricane was a success, and they built themselves an atomic bomb. Bad news: a mere month later, the US was like “girl u up?” Code named Ivy Mike, Truman dropped the first hydrogen bomb in November of 1952. It left a crater in the Earth measuring nearly two kilometers in diameter.
This just would not do for a transatlantic nuclear dick waving contest. Ivy Mike was an order of magnitude larger than Britain’s little radioactive firecracker. So they tucked their tail between their legs, ran home, and realized the obvious solution: push Windscale to its goddamn limits.
‘Fuck around and find out’ generally isn’t great policy for nuclear reactors.
In the wake of the H-bomb, Churchill put down his cigar for a jiff and was like “we’ve gotta get us one of those.” To be fair, those goddamn communists got one in 1955, and it was the Cold War. What was Britain supposed to do, let their old allies have all the tomfoolery without them?
(We wouldn’t have won WWII without the Red Army and we haven’t gotten over the self-loathing since).
To make the hydrogen bomb, they needed tritium, aka, super fucking temperamental hydrogen. This bastard isotope has two neutrons and it’s ready to party. Naturally, using a reactor that wasn’t really designed for it, they started to produce tritium at Windscale.
When they’d been trying to increase plutonium production for their first nuke, they’d modified the aluminum fuel rod canisters to allow for higher temperatures. When they wanted tritium production to move along a bit faster, they remembered “miraculously this didn’t kill us last time, right?” They trimmed down the ‘fins’ on the aluminum canisters, and it worked. Instead of taking their winnings after a hot hand, they went all in on stupid and reckless. The fuel cartridges were further modified to pack in more fuel and allow them to get a smidge hotter. They also increased the temperature of the reactor because damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Christopher Hinton was the director of the plant and he quit after all this fuckery because he was like “nuclear bullshit is messy and I don’t wanna get it on me.”
Everything was going so well.
On October 7, 1957, Pile 1 recorded an overheating issue that was somewhat typical for a graphite core. They suspected a buildup of something called Wigner energy, which is paradoxically managed by heating it. Unfortunately, that only works if you’re dealing with Wigner energy, and not, for instance, a flaming rod of uranium.
By October 10th, after a few days of wondering why adding heat wasn’t fixing the fire, shit got ugly.
Radiation detectors were going off in the smokestacks.
The reactor was on fire, burning at 1,300 degrees Celsius.
Radioactive isotopes were being spewed into the English countryside.
Tom Tuohy, a chemist at the plant who’d worked in nuclear energy for over a decade, was at home with the flu when his boss called. When he got in, he took off his badge that would have recorded his radiation levels so that he couldn’t be pulled from the disaster for exceeding his allowable dose.
He scaled Pile 1, receiving a positively heroic amount of radiation.
His solution? Dump imperial assloads of water on it. Which, nevermind not knowing if it would work, they didn’t know if it would cause a bigger disaster. A few other ideas like spraying it with carbon dioxide hadn’t panned out. So with their luck, maybe this would react like a grease fire and blow everything to kingdom come.
As it turns out, the way to put out burning nuclear fuel is to just dump imperial assloads of water on it.
Recall Cockroft’s folly, the filters on the chimneys that were built in case this exact thing motherfucking happened? Those filters caught 95% of the radioactive debris. Despite that, enough xenon-133, iodine-131, and cesium-137 was dumped into the atmosphere to contribute to about 240 cancer fatalities.
Windscale was renamed Sellafield, because I guess that helps somehow.
Tom Tuohy stared into a uranium inferno and lived to age 90. Legend.
In 1958, the US was like “c’mere you,” and nuclear secrets are once again more like “nuclear stories to share with my BFF Britain.” Old timers from the war, indeed.
Disasters rarely happen in a vacuum. With the amount of safety measures in place, nuclear accidents tend to be precipitated by years of human error compounded by gross hubris. Warnings are ignored. Experts are blown off. Equipment isn’t used correctly as a matter of protocol. It would be easy to take a sigh of relief because fatalities were relatively low while it could have been a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.
This was likely all set into motion the day Truman signed the McMahon Act eleven years earlier, and it never had to happen.
This has been the daily Moment of Science, reminding you that I will never have enough time to write about all the damage from coal.
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