The Windscale Incident

A fire in a channel must be regarded as a major disaster and must be avoided at aU costs. We have at present insufficient information on the bursting of cartridges and the oxidation rates at high temperatures... Some work on the oxidation rates of Uranium at temperatures of about 350°C has been carried out at Harwell but information relating to the conditions existing in Pile channels is very sketchy. — November 1951.  

If the opening of the Calder Hall power station in 1956 represented the zenith of the early British nuclear programme, then the events of October 1957 must represent the nadir. The celebrations that accompanied the Calder Hall opening would soon look like hubris. 

By 1957, attention had turned away from the production piles. Their role would be taken over by the new PIPPA reactors, and they were fast becoming curiosities of the past. The AEA was more hard-pressed than ever with its new responsibilities, particularly in regard to the nascent nuclear power programme. There were considerable shortages of personnel in key areas, and the Windscale incident would show up very clearly the administrative and logistical shortcomings of the AEA. 

The combination of circumstances that led to the fire was unique. They arose from causes which at the time were not fully understood, into which insufficient research had been done, and which were no longer of great interest to the AEA, which had moved on to other projects. The piles had worked successfully for six years, and their design life had been for only ten years. The procedure which led to the disaster was one which had evolved by trial and error, and had not been studied in the depth it deserved. 

The first time a spontaneous release of Wigner energy occurred was after the pile had been running for some time, and was completely unexpected. It must have come as a considerable shock to the operators at the time. This is how it was described  

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Dunster, H. J., Howells, H. Templeton, W. L. 1958. District surveys following the Windscale incident, October 1957. In Proceedings of the Second UN Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. United Nations, New York. 

N. G. Stewart and R. N. Crooks. Long-range travel of the radioactive cloud from the accident at Windscale. Nature (London) 182, 627 (1958) A, C. Chamberlain and H. J. Dunster, Deposition of radioactivity in North-West England from the accident at Wind-scale. Nature (London) 182,629 (1958) H. J. Dunster, H. Howells, and W. L. Templeton, District surveys following the Windscale incident October 1957. Proc. U.N. Int. Conf. Peaceful Uses At. Energy, 2nd., Geneva Pap. 319 (1958). 

This book concentrates on the early period of atomic power, where, apart from the Windscale incident, Britain appeared to be taking great strides in this new and dynamic technology. Slowly, however, things began to unravel. The Authority went down too many blind alleys. The firms constructing the power stations were... 

HI Dunster, H Howells and WL Templeton (2007). District Surveys following the Windscale Incident, October 1957 , Journal of Radiological Protection, 27, 217-230. 

Although Hinkley Point was the CEGB s third reactor, it too suffered from a redesign of the core following the Windscale incident, delaying the project by around a year or so. Also as a consequence of the incident, the CEGB decided that reactor number 2 should be fitted with a great deal more instrumentation than would be necessary... 

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