Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-29803990

by parados • 12 years ago

34 15 12 years ago

bbc.co.uk

parados• 12 years ago

My thermodynamics professor was there as a young scientist when this happened. From what he told us (probably in clear breach of the Official Secrets Act) this was a truly terrifying accident. The absence of temperature data meant that it was impossible to know how extensive the fire was or what remedies would work. Eventually, in desperation, water was used despite the clear hazard of creating a catastrophic Hydrogen/Oxygen explosion. My professor recalled being sent up these towers to monitor any radiation release, perhaps an early example of "this is a job for the intern".

x0x04• 12 years ago

Just remember everybody: nuclear power is super safe! Luck is a fucking super-duper strategy for not having nuclear accidents.

   Construction was well under way when Sir John, the director of the Atomic 
   Energy Research Establishment, insisted the filters be installed.
   
   "He saw that if there was a fire, which was probable, there would be no way 
   of stopping radioactive dust escaping into the atmosphere," his son said.
   
   Because they were last-minute additions, the filters were placed atop the 
   two 360ft (110m) tall chimneys rather than at the base.
   [...]
   
   They were roundly criticised by the engineers building the nuclear facility.
   
   Engineers, who had been told by the government to make the UK a nuclear 
   power by 1952, nicknamed the filters Cockcroft's Follies, mocking them as an 
   expensive piece of pointless delay.
   
   However, as one of Sir John's physicists Terence Price said after the fire, 
   "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".
   http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-29803990

zyztem• 12 years ago

Nuclear power has nothing to do with that incident. Windscale (Sellafield) facility was a military plant, it's raison d'etre was Plutonium production for UK nuclear weapons.

matthewmacleod2• 12 years ago

I don't think that comparing first-generation, experimental nuclear plants with potentially passively-safe, Gen IV nuclear reactors is useful at all. This would be a lot like complaining about the crash survivability of the Model T – i.e. not relevant.

There's a genuine question about whether or not we can produce safe nuclear plants, but the problems are political, economic and social - not technical.

trhway2• 12 years ago

insisted the filters be installed.

having good engineers who are not afraid to push for the right solution as well as the environment where such push is possible is the "super-duper strategy". Compare that to the Feynman report on Challenger.

Just remember everybody: nuclear power is super safe!

we don't have an alternative (solar and wind aren't alternatives, just stop-gap measures to buy us some time). Technological civilization goes only one direction. Once Cro-Magnon discovered bow+arrow, he killed off Neanderthals and mammoths. Once Cro-Magnon discovered fission ... The only question here is whether we discover the way to harness aneutronic fusion in time before the fission (incl. safe at first look ones like thorium based) and neutronic fusion result in the amount of nuclear waste and disasters seriously affecting the existence of the civilization itself. If only instead of anti-nuclear "fear spreading" propaganda there were pro-fusion research investment "educational" propaganda ...

trhway2• 12 years ago

it is fascinating how they were taking decisions as they go practically without any SOPs [as they basically didn't exist really] :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire#Fire

"There was no doubt that the reactor was now on fire, and had been for almost 48 hours. Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy[10] donned full protective equipment and breathing apparatus and scaled the 80-foot ladder to the top of the reactor building, where he stood atop the reactor lid to examine the rear of the reactor, the discharge face. Here he reported a dull red luminescence visible, lighting up the void between the back of the reactor and the rear containment. Red hot fuel cartridges were glowing in the fuel channels on the discharge face. He returned to the reactor upper containment several times throughout the incident, at the height of which a fierce conflagration was raging from the discharge face and playing on the back of the reinforced concrete containment — concrete whose specifications required that it be kept below a certain temperature to prevent its disintegration and collapse.

Initial fire fighting attempts

Operators were unsure what to do about the fire. First they tried to blow the flames out by running the fans at maximum speed, but this fed the flames. Tom Hughes and his colleague had already created a fire break by ejecting some undamaged fuel cartridges from around the blaze, and Tom Tuohy suggested trying to eject some from the heart of the fire by bludgeoning the melted cartridges through the reactor and into the cooling pond behind it with scaffolding poles. This proved impossible and the fuel rods refused to budge, no matter how much force was applied. The poles were withdrawn with their ends red hot; one returned dripping molten metal. Hughes knew this had to be molten irradiated uranium, causing serious radiation problems on the charge hoist itself."

By association and contrast that brings Chernobyl where catastrophe resulted from experimentations/tests outside of the established [existing] SOPs.

talideon• 12 years ago

Sellafield/Windscale is the primary reason why Ireland is so staunchly anti-nuclear.

arethuza• 12 years ago

This accident, along with quite a few others, is covered in the excellent book: Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima by James Mahaffey:

http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-M...

Edit: The book is no way anti-nuclear and actually starts with a description of a horrific accident at a hydro-electric plant.

bcantrill• 12 years ago

YES. This book made the rounds on our entire software engineering team here at Joyent, and got to the point that people with only passing interest in the subject were reading it just to get our newly-discovered references to various nuclear disasters and near-disasters. The book -- unlike most technical non-fiction -- is written very, very well, and the snarky footnotes are themselves worth the price of admission. Highly recommended!

miander• 12 years ago

I think Cockcroft is a small hero in this story. He expended significant political capital to push through a very unpopular idea because he could see the importance at a time when absolute safety was not the first concern. Brave.

Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster

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