If I mention nuclear reactor accidents, you’d probably think of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, or maybe Chernobyl (or, now, Chornobyl). But there have been others that, for whatever reason, aren’t as well publicized. Did you know there is an International Nuclear Event Scale? Like the Richter scale, but for nuclear events. A zero on the scale is a little oopsie. A seven is like Chernobyl or Fukushima, the only two such events at that scale so far. Three Mile Island and the event you’ll read about in this post were both level five events. That other level five event? The Windscale fire incident in October of 1957.
If you imagine this might have something to do with the Cold War, you are correct. It all started back in the 1940s. The British decided they needed a nuclear bomb project and started their version of the Manhattan Project called “Tube Alloys.” But in 1943, they decided to merge the project with the American program.
The British, rightfully so, saw themselves as co-creators of the first two atomic bombs. However, in post-World War paranoia, the United States shut down all cooperation on atomic secrets with the 1946 McMahon Act.
We Are Not Amused
The British were not amused and knew that to secure a future seat at the world table, it would need to develop its own nuclear capability, so it resurrected Tube Alloys. If you want a detour about the history of Britan’s bomb program, the BBC has a video for you that you can see below.
Of course, post-war Britain wasn’t exactly flush with cash, so they had to limit their scope a bit. While the Americans had built bombs with both uranium and plutonium, the UK decided to focus on plutonium, which could create a stronger bomb with less material.
Of course, that also means you have to create plutonium, so they built two reactors — or piles, as they were known then. They were both in the same location near Seascale, Cumberland.
Inside a Pile
The reactors were pretty simple. There was a big block of graphite with channels drilled through it horizontally. You inserted uranium fuel cartridges in one end, pushing the previous cartridge through the block until they fell out the other side into a pool of water.
The cartridges were encased in aluminum and had cooling fins. These things got hot! Immediately, though, practical concerns — that is, budgets — got in the way. Water cooling was a good idea, but there were problems. First, you needed ultra-pure water. Next, you needed to be close to the sea to dump radioactive cooling water, but not too close to any people. Finally, you had to be willing to lose a circle around the site about 60 miles in diameter if the worst happened.
The US facility at Hanford, indeed, had a 30-mile escape road for use if they had to abandon the site. They dumped water into the Columbia River, which, of course, turned out to be a bad idea. The US didn’t mind spending on pure water.
Since the British didn’t like any of those constraints, they decided to go with air cooling using fans and 400-foot-tall chimneys.
Our Heros
Most of us can relate to being on a project where the rush to save money causes problems. A physicist, Terence Price, wondered what would happen if a fuel cartridge split open. For example, one might miss the water pool on the other side of the reactor. There would be a fire and uranium oxide dust blowing out the chimney.
The idea of filters in each chimney was quickly shut down. Since the stacks were almost complete, they’d have to go up top, costing money and causing delays. However, Sir John Cockcroft, in charge of the construction, decided he’d install the filters anyway. The filters became known as Cockcroft’s Follies because they were deemed unnecessary.
So why are these guys the heroes of this story? It isn’t hard to guess.
A Rush to Disaster
The government wanted to quickly produce a bomb before treaties would prohibit them from doing so. That put them on a rush to get H-bombs built by 1958. There was no time to build more reactors, so they decided to add material to the fuel cartridges to produce tritium, including magnesium. The engineers were concerned about flammability, but no one wanted to hear it.
They also decided to make the fins of the cartridges smaller to raise the temperature, which was good for production. This also allowed them to stuff more fuel inside. Engineers again complained. Hotter, more flammable fuel. What could go wrong? When no one would listen, the director, Christopher Hinton, resigned.
The Inevitable
The change in how heat spread through the core was dangerous. But the sensors in place were set for the original patterns, so the increased heat went undetected. Everything seemed fine.
It was known that graphite tends to store some energy from neutron bombardment for later release, which could be catastrophic. The solution was to heat the core to a point where the graphite started to get soft, which would gradually release the potential energy. This was a regular part of operating the reactors. The temperature would spike and then subside. Operations would then proceed as usual.
By 1957, they’d done eight of these release cycles and prepared for a ninth. However, this one didn’t go as planned. Usually, the core would heat evenly. This time, one channel got hot and the rest didn’t. They decided to try the release again. This time it seemed to work.
As the core started to cool as expected, there was an anomaly. One part of the core was rising instead, reaching up to 400C. They sped up the fans and the radiation monitors determined that they had a leak up the chimney.
Memories
Remember the filters? Cockcroft”s Follies? Well, radioactive dust had gone up the chimney before. In fact, it had happened pretty often. As predicted, the fuel would miss the pool and burst.
With the one spot getting hotter, operators assumed a cartridge had split open in the core. They were wrong. The cartridge was on fire. The Windscale reactor was on fire.
Of course, speeding up the fans just made the fire worse. Two men donned protective gear and went to peek at an inspection port near the hot spot. They saw four channels of fuel glowing “bright cherry red”. At that point, the reactor had been on fire for two days. The Reactor Manager suited up and climbed the 80 feet to the top of the reactor building so he could assess the backside of the unit. It was glowing red also.
Fight Fire with ???
The fans only made the fire worse. They tried to push the burning cartridges out with metal poles. They came back melted and radioactive. The reactor was now white hot. They then tried about 25 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but getting it to where it was needed proved to be too difficult, so that effort was ineffective.
By the 11th of October, an estimated 11 tonnes of uranium were burning, along with magnesium in the fuel for tritium production. One thermocouple was reading 3,100C, although that almost had to be a malfunction. Still, it was plenty hot. There was fear that the concrete containment building would collapse from the heat.
You might think water was the answer, and it could have been. But when water hits molten metal, hydrogen gas results, which, of course, is going to explode under those conditions. They decided, though, that they had to try. The manager once again took to the roof and tried to listen for any indication that hydrogen was building up. A dozen firehoses pushed into the core didn’t make any difference.
Sci Fi
If you read science fiction, you probably can guess what did work. Starve the fire for air. The manager, a man named Tuohy, and the fire chief remained and sent everyone else out. If this didn’t work, they were going to have to evacuate the nearby town anyway.
They shut off all cooling and ventilation to the reactor. It worked. The temperature finally started going down, and the firehoses were now having an effect. It took 24 hours of water flow to get things completely cool, and the water discharge was, of course, radioactive.
If you want a historical documentary on the even, here’s one from Spark:
Aftermath
The government kept a tight lid on the incident and underreported what had been released. But there was much less radioactive iodine, cesium, plutonium, and polonium release because of the chimney filters. Cockcroft’s Folly had paid off.
While it wasn’t ideal, official estimates are that 240 extra cancer cases were due to the accident. Unofficial estimates are higher, but still comparatively modest. Also, there had been hushed-up releases earlier, so it is probably that the true number due to this one accident is even lower, although if it is your cancer, you probably don’t care much which accident caused it.
Milk from the area was dumped into the sea for a while. Today, the reactor is sealed up, and the site is called Sellafield. It still contains thousands of damaged fuel elements within. The site is largely stable, although the costs of remediating the area have been, and will continue to be staggering.
This isn’t the first nuclear slip-up that could have been avoided by listening to smart people earlier. We’ve talked before about how people tend to overestimate or sensationalize these kinds of disasters. But it still is, of course, something you want to avoid.
Featured image: “HD.15.003” by United States Department of Energy
And these continued disasters are the reason why the drive for small scale nuclear reactors to power ever increasing power demands of AI and datacenters is absolutely terrifying, the last thing anyone should want are reactors in the hands of people who want to move fast and break things with zero regard for the environment.
And why SMR cores are not supposed to be built, installed, or operated by the customers themselves. Instead, they’re supposed to be built as self-contained units that are trucked in, used, and then trucked out when spent. Just so some middle manager can’t say “We’ll just crank it up to 11 so we can get this done by Friday.”
i wonder where nuclear technology would be now if we didn’t constantly fear monger it into the ground. containment rate for nuclear disasters is pretty good. we got to do nuclear to get gud at nuclear, and we really need nuclear.
and if were being honest, all we have done in the last couple hundred or so years is move fast and break things with our fossil fuel infrastructure.
sometimes i wonder if hippies are a great filter.
I would say, why don’t you go ahead and build one yourself, you seem very confident. that is promising. what could possibly go wrong?
I have full confidence in nuclear energy and use it all the time. It’s just that I don’t trust humans with it. like you don’t give a toddler a loaded gun to play with.
The problem, as stated above is that the people who know what could go wrong are not the ones making desicions. people like you are. thats the real problem. it was that problem in every big nuclear accident: stubborn people ignoring scientific evidence.
you bring it like its a car crash: shit happens. only in these cases, it takes a very long time and a lot if money to clear those intersections, if possible at all.
But shure, build those electricity producing timebombs to generate more kitten pictures, Absolute Insanity and virtual porn. we are junkies and need our shot.
there is no place for hubris in a nuclear control room. these people need to be well trained, sane, and accountable. of all people you do not want me in charge of that.
car accidents are not the right parallel. air travel on the other hand has a safety record written in blood. a venerable meat grinder compared to the worst nuclear incidents. but its the safest way to travel now. nuclear has had its incidents and there is a lot to learn about them, failure to do this will make this technology really dangerous. of course modern reactors have passive safety baked in, redundancy, backups on top of backups. we know not to build reactors in natural disaster zones or to let industry make demands on the power plant that are way out of spec.
energy isnt just kitten pictures, though that is important. its heat, sanitation, water desalination, transportation, logistics, all of which elevate the downtrodden. or we can tell 8 billion people they should freeze/bake to death because the alternative is more lethal than hypothermia/heat stroke (its not) while continuing to burn fossil fuel, wood, poo, anything that will burn to stay warm in the winter time despite all the bad stuff we know about that. or we can replace the forests and grasslands with solar fields or wind turbines even though every metric tells us that’s not good enough.
If air travel was treated the same as nuclear power, that fact would not matter even in the slightest. Nuclear power already is among the safest ways, if not the safest, to produce electricity in terms of deaths per TWh.
Air travel too would be a “timebomb” for the fact that some accidents inevitably do happen, and people would be picketing at airports demanding them to be shut down. People would be ranting rabidly against “planes falling out of the sky on residential areas”, not because it happens with any regularity but simply because it’s possible.
It’s double standards all the way. Other means to produce electricity, and the death and damage they cause, do not matter, because maintenance personnel falling off of wind mills, or people drowning under burst dams, or getting poisoned by dumped chemicals from a solar panel factory in China is not a direct perceivable threat in the same sense as a nuclear site nearby^. It’s other people’s problems.
People simply do not account for their part in the death toll through their demand and use of energy. If they did, they would pick the least harmful option despite it being the scariest.
^(not to mention chemicals processing plants that are everywhere, which carry similar risks and much worse track records of safety and accident management, but somehow the public doesn’t seem to mind.)
With natural gas supply issues, Germany just destroyed the last nuclear reactor cooling tower. Knee jerk stupidity.
Grok: If nuclear had never existed, coal/gas replacement would add 420,000–7 million deaths by mid-century (NASA GISS projection). Conversely, nuclear has prevented ~1.8 million deaths historically by avoiding fossil fuel use.
Walk-away safe reactor types:
Below are several well-documented examples of walk-away safe nuclear reactor technologies. “Walk-away safe” means the reactor can safely shut down and cool itself indefinitely without any human intervention, external power, or active systems, relying entirely on passive physics (e.g., gravity, natural convection, conduction, and material properties).
Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) / HTR-PM (High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor)
Developer: Originally South Africa (PBMR Ltd.), now operational in China (HTR-PM, Shidaowan plant).
Coolant: Helium gas.
Fuel: TRISO-coated uranium pebbles (each particle has multiple failure-resistant layers).
Safety Mechanism:
Extremely high temperature tolerance (>1600°C).
In a total loss-of-cooling accident, heat dissipates by conduction and radiation through the graphite moderator to the reactor vessel and then to the environment.
No meltdown possible — pebbles retain fission products even at 2000°C.
Walk-away proof: Demonstrated in loss-of-coolant tests (e.g., German AVR reactor in 1970s ran without cooling for days; core stabilized naturally).
Status: HTR-PM (210 MWe) achieved full power in December 2023 in China — world’s first commercial walk-away safe reactor.
Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) / PRISM (Power Reactor Innovative Small Module)
Developer: Argonne National Laboratory (USA), now GE Hitachi.
Coolant: Liquid sodium (metallic).
Fuel: Metal alloy (U-Pu-Zr).
Safety Mechanism:
Negative temperature and void coefficients — if coolant boils or temperature rises, reactivity drops automatically.
Passive shutdown: Control rods fall by gravity; sodium expands and leaks out of core via natural circulation paths if overheated.
Pool-type design: Entire primary system in a large sodium pool — acts as heat sink.
Walk-away proof: EBR-II 1986 test — full loss of coolant and power; reactor shut down and cooled itself passively for hours.
Status: PRISM design is NRC-licensable; proposed for waste burning and plutonium disposition.
Toshiba 4S (Super Safe, Small and Simple)
Developer: Toshiba (Japan) / Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry.
Coolant: Liquid sodium.
Power: 10–50 MWe.
Safety Mechanism:
Reflector-controlled core: Neutron reflectors slowly move upward by thermal expansion if temperature rises — reducing reactivity.
Tall chimney design enables natural convection cooling for decades.
Sealed for 30 years — no refueling.
Walk-away proof: Designed to cool via radiation to silo walls and air convection — no pumps or valves needed.
Status: Proposed for remote Alaskan villages; pre-application review with NRC.
B&W mPower / GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 (Small Light-Water SMRs with Passive Safety)
Coolant: Water (light water reactor).
Safety Mechanism:
Integral design: Steam generators inside pressure vessel — eliminates large pipe breaks.
Passive core cooling: Gravity-fed water from in-containment tank + natural circulation.
Isolation condenser removes heat to atmosphere via heat exchangers.
Walk-away proof:
72+ hours without operator action or power (mPower).
7+ days (BWRX-300) — then indefinite air cooling.
Status: BWRX-300 under construction in Canada (Darlington); first pour 2025.
NuScale VOYGR (Integral PWR SMR)
Developer: NuScale Power (USA).
Coolant: Light water.
Power: 77 MWe per module (up to 12 modules).
Safety Mechanism:
Each module fully submerged in underground water pool.
No pumps — natural circulation.
Emergency core cooling via gravity and steam condensation.
Decay heat removed to pool → atmosphere.
Walk-away proof: NRC-certified for indefinite cooling without power or operator action (pool acts as ultimate heat sink).
Status: First deployment planned for UAMPS (Utah) — delayed but design certified.
Lead-Cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs) — e.g., BREST-OD-300 (Russia)
Developer: Rosatom (Russia).
Coolant: Liquid lead.
Fuel: Nitride (U-Pu).
Safety Mechanism:
High boiling point of lead (~1749°C) → no boiling.
Strong natural convection (density difference drives flow).
Core designed to export heat via vessel walls if all cooling lost.
Walk-away proof: Russian tests show core stabilizes below 700°C via radiation and convection.
Status: Under construction in Seversk, Russia.
Summary Table
Reactor
Type
Coolant
Walk-Away Duration
Status
HTR-PM
Pebble Bed
Helium
Indefinite
Operational (China)
PRISM / IFR
Fast
Sodium
Days → Indefinite
Design ready
Toshiba 4S
Fast
Sodium
30 years
Pre-licensing
BWRX-300
BWR
Water
7+ days → air cooling
Under construction
NuScale
PWR
Water
Indefinite (pool)
NRC certified
BREST-300
LFR
Lead
Indefinite
Under construction
True walk-away safety = no meltdown, no offsite release, no intervention — achieved via passive physics only.
These designs represent the future of inherently safe nuclear power.
Winston; please don’t spam AI generated slop. If we want to ask AI, we’d do it ourselves.
I keep trying, but nobody wants to trade plutonium for a few boxes of used pinball machine parts.
Hello brother.
I’m not really into nuclear power…but…Tsar bomba project is stalled…
Joke feds.
50 Megatons should be 2nd!
I’m plenty sane, ask any of the voices in my head.
What vintage pinball machines?
Which isotope are you looking for?
How much and what purity?
Get a scoop of muck from the Columbia river…perhaps a fish.
The Pony Party really should be a nuclear power.
Of all the nuclear bombs held on earth only the North Korean ones are held by silly people!
This imbalance should be fixed.
Tyranny of the serious.
Someone should get Putin with a Whoopi cushion.
I digress again.
Thats somewhat like saying I wonder how awesome my house would be if experts didn’t ‘fear monger’ about all that fire safety stuff. The answer to both hypoteheticals is the same, a they’d both be a smoldering pile.
Nuclear is necessarily highly dangerous to begin with. Every stage of it is dangerous and some of that danger lasts for longer than the length of known human history into the future. The inherent risk always has to be balanced with the scientific benefits and whole life costs. Just for things like electrical power that cost is excessive when there are other means to the same end.
Nuclear technology is safe when used and managed by attentive, trained, competent individuals. And with experience, those individuals should make things even safer.
Now, back to the real world, and the profit motive. That should be enough to make you think that hippies aren’t the only problem here.
In the words of Baron Frankenstein – “it is fools like you who have blocked progress throughout the ages. You make pronouncements on half facts you know nothing of – but I will give you a parallel you may just appreciate. Had man not been subject to invention and experiment, then tonight sir, you would have eaten your dinner in a cave, you would have strewn the bones about the floor, and wiped your fingers on a piece of animal skin. In fact, your lapels do look quite greasy – good night”.
There is a vast vast difference in plausible accident or even active malice worst case situations between a new reactor designed to generate electricity safely and one designed primarily (or entirely) for making really big explosions at a later date. And even rather old reactors of relatively unsafe designs can be and have been operated perfectly safely.
Obviously Nuclear of any sort does (or at least should) require some care in reactor type selection, location, management, EOL planing etc as it does have the potential to be very harmful even long after you have finished with it. So letting techbro’s with the “move fast and break things with zero regard for the environment” mentality shouldn’t be allowed without serious oversight – if they want to fund it fine, but they have to play by the rules. But that is also true of basically everything those sort of folks want to do…
There’s a reason why nobody does graphite moderated reactors any more.
The drive for SMRs is not the accidents but the long build times of larger plants. Larger plants are more efficient and economical in the long run but keeping the momentum going to complete larger plants has proven difficult.
The long build times of larger plants are in large part due to the demands of risk management. The need to build larger reactors in turn is caused by the huge bureaucratic overhead of getting any reactor built. Catch-22.
The answer by SMRs is that a small reactor does not have the power density to fail that badly, hence why they can be built with less bureaucratic overhead.
Ummm…. Bureaucratic oversight is going to be the same whether its 10MW or 1000MW. The SRE was only 6.5MW and still managed to release more radioactive gas with its meltdown than TMI did.
The fact that governments will apply the same bureaucracy on 10 MW as 1000 MW is kinda the point. As it is, every reactor is a prototype of its own kind, so it has to go through all the hurdles and clear all the red tape. With that much overhead to deal with, you can’t build small reactors because they will cost more than they’re worth. Building bigger reactors introduces the safety risks that justify the heavy bureaucracy, so it’s bureaucracy that demands the bureaucracy, not the fact that nuclear power is inherently that risky.
SMRs are identical copies of one another, so the whole lot go through many of the approval processes just once. The more you build, the cheaper they get. At least, until they decide to change the rules again.
The SRE was an experimental reactor lacking most modern safety features, and the operators didn’t know how to use it. After all, it was experimental, so they kept operating it for days in a damaged condition with the coolant system leaking. They noted that the reactor was behaving weirdly, but didn’t stop. They even noticed coolant contamination on the fuel elements, but just washed them clean and put them back in. They even had an explosion accident and contamination, but they simply waited for the radiation to subside and re-started the reactor, then got more contamination, shut down, and re-started again!
None of the proposed SMRs are air cooled graphite (Windscale), water cooled graphite with a positive void coefficient (Chernobyl) or designs that can’t passively handle decay heat post-shutdown (Fukushima).
The last thing anyone should want is unscientific doomsayers to keep carbon emissions high.
i think the smrs have a lot in common with military reactors like the kind used on submarines. the navy sets the safety bar that’s for sure. retired naval reactor engineers are the people you want running them.
That is their point. Naval reactors are walk-away safe because they’re small enough that they can contain themselves in a meltdown. As you scale up, the surface areas that transmit heat scale in size^2 while the reactor power scales in size^3 so there is a tipping point in size where the reactor can produce massively more heat than it can get rid of, for long enough that it breaches containment and requires additional measures like core catchers and multi-layer containment structures that explode with hydrogen buildup or collapse in earthquakes, and that is where the big mess happens.
You want more power, you add another reactor, not a bigger reactor.
Of course you can still design a small reactor that runs on highly enriched fuel and becomes so twitchy to react that it can blow itself apart. Those too have been tried and the results were generally bad, which is why we don’t do them anymore.
I’ll just leave this here:
Tube Alloys: The UK’s nuclear program began in 1941, building on earlier work by the MAUD Committee (British scientific working group formed during World War II).
Manhattan Project: The US program was officially started in 1942, after being prompted by the findings of the MAUD Report that was sent to the US.
I thought it might have been part of the”Tizard Mission”, but I do not think that it was.
“ A seven is like Chernobyl or Fukushima”
Why in the world would those be ranked the same value. The former killed dozens of people, the latter killed no one (the panic killed some people though).
The former let out a plume of radioactive gas, the latter had small leaks into the ocean, releasing in total, way less radioactive media.
https://www.nei.org/resources/fact-sheets/comparing-fukushima-and-chernobyl
Not my rating… but if you look it up, they are both 7s and I presume they have some criteria not just loss of life.
both reactors suffered failure of their containment vessels. tmi did not and its a 5.
Chernobyl had no containment vessel. Also the Fukushima containment vessels held (the surrounding buildings were damaged by hydrogen explosions) .
Originally Fukushima was rated as three level 5 events but was upgraded to a single level 7 event. There was some intense lobbying to upgrade it to 7 by multiple parties each with their own agendas.
INES scale is flawed, plain and simple. Kyshtym was a much worse disaster than Fukushima and only ranks 6, and the number of Soviet military meltdowns or steam explosions all should also outrank Fukushima.
This was such an embarrassment to the UK government that the site was renamed “Sellafield” in an attempt to escape history.
Renaming a location known for its extremely strong winds to anything other than Windscale, I am sure played an important factor as well.
Wonder if ceramic instead of aluminum would be better?
This is a VERY different account from what’s presented in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wFX0PXgbps
There’s also “Our Rector is On Fire” https://youtu.be/vcsyMvQtlKs
Some of the scientists are in their 70s/80s yet still seem bright eyed and quick witted. If only they’d known about project OBERON.
Alternative link to the Spark documentary for people in the UK, as the YT upload is blocked here:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8xsfee
In an ironic development the video from ‘Spark’ says “Video unavailable The uploader has not made this video available in your country”, but I am in the UK (although, fortunately, a long way from Sellafield).
Happosai got there first!
According to a book once on sale, the reactor was used to create tritium for H-bombs, and to do so it was
deliberately operated exceeding the intended spec. (115 % I think). It would not be surprising that the energy in the graphite (Wigner energy) then was excessive which would lead to the accident.
You are correct in that it was used to make tritium. Its original mission was to make plutonium but at the time of the fire that was more relegated to a secondary mission and tritium became its main one as plutonium production was largely shifted to other reactors.
It was operated past its design capacity. The magnitude of the Wigner energy in the graphite however is not related to the power level that the reactor is operated at. It is related to net neutron flux exposure. Meaning you can build the same Wigner energy with a longer exposure operating at a lower power as you can in a shorter time operating at a higher power.
Interestingly US graphite core reactors didn’t suffer from Wigner energy build ups. Thy used a differently constructed graphite blocks. The early production reactors started at about 250MW and had their power scaled up to around 2000MW.
There was also a story reported about a speck of plutonium oxide being found in a local bird nest (!) . The filters can’t have been perfect.
I have to wonder, why the Brits bother with their untrustworthy BS.
Cockcroft’s folly was given more credit than it actually achieved. There were two prior releases that it didn’t live up to expectations. It did help significantly but reports of it being 95% effective are a bit exaggerated from what I have read.
Even to day they keep shooting the birds at the site, because the containment building is now damaged and birds get in and out.
Americans starting a cooperation with the UK and benefiting from the work, only to shut the door when it’s time to reciprocate is a classic. The US did the same with the development of supersonic flight and the X-1. The UK did a lot of the work, a cooperation with the US was created as it was believed they were further along then they really were, only to get ghosted after sharing their work with the US in the name of their cooperation.
The US complains about China stealing IP a lot, but the US got to where it is by doing very similar things. I’m definitely not saying that makes it right, but it definitely makes it more interesting and nuanced.
Ok, do the Kyshtym disaster next, that one is probably a seven on that NES scale, since the fallout still haunts the area. Maybe, it could have been avoided if per-fluoro carbons were used, funny how PFCs and nuclear power go hand-in-hand (it’s no coincidence that Union Carbide was directly involved in Manhattan Project, unfortunately, they had also been at the center of technogenic disaster in Bhopal, India). As Dude pointed out, it’s a barbed wire path to get any technology to work as safely as possible, and even when you make it safe, there’s no guarantee in sight for it to be completely foolproof. Case in point, more people should know about this type of stuff so that improvements can be made based on lessons learned. It would be neat to see a column from HaD about the different accidents and how they were thwarted, not just fail of the week.
Many years ago I met someone who used to work there when it was being built. He said that the unfinished pile rooms during construction were a popular place for trysts, but you could tell who made use of this by the graphite markings on the seat of their lab coats!
“While it wasn’t ideal, official estimates are that 240 extra cancer cases were due to the accident. Unofficial estimates are higher, but still comparatively modest. Also, there had been hushed-up releases earlier, so it is probably that the true number due to this one accident is even lower, although if it is your cancer, you probably don’t care much which accident caused it.”
Que triste es leer que se busque “minimizar” un incidente de este tipo de esta forma.
240 eh… how gullible are/were British people really? Because that requires US levels of it.
UK Govt report on sellafield :
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmpubacc/363/report.html
For some interresting British nuclear engineering see the Blue Peacock nuclear landmine.