I trained as an industrial radiographer in the early 1980s. As part of our training we looked at welds on pipes in then-old nuke power stations. The welds were terrible, and the cause of almost every minor/major leak back then.
@@ZilogBob Matt Groening denies it but Springfield nuclear power plant has some similarties to Oregon's first and only nuclear power plant, Trojan. Leaks, corners cut on construction, turned out to be on a fault line...no wonder it didn't stay online for long.
@@drewgehringer7813 well, the Army ran a few reactors. On the Dew line, where it leaked like a sieve, on a glacier in Greenland, where it also leaked like a sieve and SL-1, which exploded from a prompt critical condition generating sufficient steam hammer to physically lift the reactor vessel 10 feet. After that, nobody trusted the Army with a nuclear reactor... Most of the problems tracing back, like Windscale, to a totally shit design and implementation. At least he got scrubbers installed!
@martynjames5963 I'm working on a Music Technology PhD, some of my music and writing is concerned with the dualities of nuclear technology. I don't suppose you would mind a quick chat over email, I would love to include some of your insights. You can contact me through my youtube about page. Perhaps let me know here if you send an email, sometimes have junk folder issues.Humble Thanks.
For those not as old as me . . . This documentary about events just a dozen years after VE day has many echoes of wartime attitudes. The cavalier and jocular (or do I mean witless) attitude to danger. Improvisation; make do and mend; trial and error. Being part of the team (regardless of your misgivings). The importance of not letting the side down (even at the cost of endangering the local population). “Keeping mum.” The need to not let the cat out of the bag (or at least to suffocate it before it got to the PM). I might add that even after this disaster, the job of being an atomic scientist carried a considerable social cachet -- not to mention a top salary.
Well, the root cause was from, then poorly understood, Wigner energy release. The ionizing radiation dislocated crystalline bonds, which interfered with the graphite's function as a moderator, so the reactor had to be run fairly hot to "anneal" the graphite, allowing the bonds to snap back to their normal configuration and when they did - release tons of heat. Add in insufficient instrumentation to tell when hotspots formed, a fire was inevitable and recognized quite late. I can just imagine the look on his face when he looked down from the scrubber gallery and saw flames licking up the rear of the reactor pile! The amount of milk dumped into the sea still blows my mind!
@@adolflenin4973 I still shake my head over the amount of milk poured into the sea. Especially, given that a milk spill on land is a hazmat event. Milk from 500 km2 was diluted and poured into the sea. That's a lot of moo juice! Which, between that and residue from the fire itself, contaminated clams and oysters in the Irish sea. One underestimation can generate all kinds of merry hell!
That "Make do and Mend" mentality - it amazes me no one thought that was inappropriate to apply to atomic bombs and their breeder reactors. Push mower, OK sure. Submarine... maybe. Reactors - nope, figure it out completely first THEN build it. And figuring its OK to poison your own people as long as it enabled you to blow up the other guys.... Incomprehensible to me. Of course our guys werent much smarter - making a nuclear reactor that you adjust the control rods MANUALLY (like, by HAND) and they were sticky, so you might have to give them a yank to adjust them but you only need to move it 2" and pulling a single rod 3" too far could cause prompt critical.
I didn't think a documentary from the 90s could feel this scary, but here it is. The ominous music, the sudden inversions of color, that fire effect overlaid on the shot of the fuel channels, and that menacing steam whistle.
BBC doc's are leagues ahead of everyone else in the 80's n 90's and 2000's + US docs where its fast loud flashy scene changes, odd metaphors and voice over repeating the same info 5 times before they move on just to make sure the lowest brain dead a-hole can follow along... 50mins of a doco with 5mins of information fleshed out as entertainment.
I worked in a specialist children's hospital in Newcastle, the Fleming Memorial Hospital, where we treated many children with rare deformities in the 80s and most of them were from the Seascale/Sellafield area. We were convinced that these rare conditions were the result of the Sellafield plant but government officials would not entertain our concerns and shoved it under the table.
Can you assemble some solid statistics which show a significant cluster of these types of abnormalities in that area? If you can, this is the kind of story which should be submitted to the investigative media. They love to expose cover-ups. I hope you can do that.
It must have been an even more difficult and distressing time for you, I feel ashamed that the truth of this terrible event has been suppressed by the governments during and after this incident, that is not a democratic way to run the country, in fact it is a defenceless deliberate act to lie to us. Thank you for your service to our country and more importantly to the innumerable number of children you treated and supported through possibly the worst time in their lives.
@@allandavis8201 almost certainly about money. The government of the day would be prosecuted for many millions£££. It would also be possible that full disclosure would damage the UKs international standing in the world..
Thankyou for posting your experience. I'm a newbie to this but there's a pdf report I found that only at the end concludes their sampling should have been specifically in the areas downwind of that tragedy, to focus rather on known contaminated ground than a much diluted 360deg scan which obviously must include areas that never rcd fallout. I've just started the Jean McSorley book this afternoon 'Living in the Shadow' and its full of official obfuscation and even trade union foot dragging. I was also surprised to read the wages were not high or in fact generous for the ordinary Cumbrians employed at the plant, scandalous considering the dangers and the overall huge amounts of money pumped into the place. Not keen on Tuohy either, I read here he would rather NOT see workers receive any compensation!
Anders F. Furthermore: "...Now don't you fear for anyone's safety. Everything's under control; just let fire crews douse the fire. Tea Time, old man?" ...Typical flippant, clinical detachment. Detachment from REALITY
It's interesting to compare this 1990 documentary to the one they did in 2007. There are a few divergences. For example, the 2007 documentary claims that the fire was extinguished by turning off the fans, while this earlier documentary states that water put it out. Other inconsistencies include the fact that the 2007 documentary hardly mentions the pollution that had occurred prior to the accident; and nor does it mention the damage to Cockcroft's filters and their ineffectiveness at preventing contamination escaping. I find it remarkable that two documentaries on the same subject can have such great differences! I believe more in this 1990 documentary for the simple reason that today there is no real reporting, It's either sensationalised to garner views or tapered to suit a particular interest. Back in the 1980s when this documentary was being put together, the BBC was an organisation that could be trusted to be very objective and unbiased in its reporting of these types of events. Those days are gone.
No you're wrong, read any BBC article on their website and there's a link at the bottom on why you can trust the BBC. Of course it's written by the BBC, but you can trust them so, it's okay.
+Limitless Nothingness The shape of the containment structure depends on the type of reactor, but they're not specifically designed to protect against a terror attack. What you see from the outside is not the actual reactor vessel. For example, boiling water reactors use a square shaped secondary containment building that houses the cylindrical reactor vessel and suppression pools. On the other hand, pressurized water reactors use a spherical outer containment building. This houses both the cylindrical reactor vessel and pressurized steam generators. The type of containment structure depends on how the reactor is designed to cope with accidents. In the case of boiling water reactors, the coolant flashes to steam and is ultimately condensed by the suppression pools where the pressure is relieved. If this fails, the pressure inside the reactor vessel builds to a critical point where it eventually explodes, like the reactors at Fukushima. In pressurized water reactors, the containment structure provides adequate volume for the steam to expand. In the Three Mile Island accident, this was a major concern as pressure inside the spherical outer containment building was at the limit. Radioactive steam was vented to atmosphere to relieve some of the pressure.
Another factor was that they clipped the cooling fins on the cartridges, making them run hotter: this was to improve plutonium yield. Then, later, they clipped even more off the fins to produce tritium for the H-bomb.
and still today they haven't learned their lesson... look at Fukushima who's the genius that built nuclear reactors on a major fault line. and decided to use saltwater Cooling...
@@honeybear8485 The entirety of Japan is on a faultline, what are they supposed to do? Also all of their nuclear plants have survived every Earthquake that has hit them, they just made a stupid decision to put backup generators below sea-level in the path of a tsunami. Stupidity was behind Fukushima, not an Earthquake.
America was lucky they made haphazzard piles that could have gotten out of hand experimenting with how to make a reaction and sustain it it was uncharted territory as the americans were not sharing knowledge just something to keep in mind
Having just seen Chernobyl I’m struck by the similarities of scientists and engineers taking huge risks in order to please their political masters. This could easily have been another Chernobyl if the water had resulted in a hydrogen explosion. Tom Tuohy was a real hero and one of the few to come out of this with any credit
@@TheObersalzburg On 12 December 1942 CP-1's power output was increased to 200 W, enough to power a light bulb. Lacking shielding of any kind, it was a radiation hazard for everyone in the vicinity, and further testing was continued at 0.5 W.
I suppose one of the benefits is your coolant supply is inexhaustible and it’s simpler than having having to pump water as a coolant. Plenty of reasons not to do it that way of course but it was probably cheaper and faster to do it that way when there was no need to generate electricity.
well there's a problem with that, from people talking about explosion as shown in the accident the "infinite coolant" was completely USELESS when it was most needed, as a matter of fact it made things worse, there is no way an air cooled reactor is a good ideia, it may be simpler but it's so sketchy
Pushing the fuel cartridges out of the reactor by letting them fall in a heap on the floor is about as intelligent as using a bread knife to get your toast out of a plugged-in toaster!
No worries mate, down in OZ we have those earth leakage trips on our electical boards and if you jam your finger in the mains it trips out in microseconds.
honestly its not that different than what the U.S. did for project manhattan; B reactor, the world's first large-scale reactor intended for more than just research, worked similarly it just used water cooling over air cooling, which it turns out is less safe.
The entire cooling system that Windscale was using was suspect right from the get-go. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you shouldn't cool a nuclear reactor merely by blowing air through it and then exhausting that air straight out a smoke stack. Even when they finally decided to put a Scrubber at the top of the stack, the Scrubber was entirely inadequate and poorly designed. There's a reason why closed-circuit designs are typically used, and it's a mighty important one.
@@MostlyPennyCat Did you not watch the documentary? The filters never worked properly, and allowed uranium oxide dust to escape and contaminate the countryside.
It was the cold war and they wanted the nukes. This was a nuke factory, as stated in the documentary. 'Filters were an afterthought due to timescales'.
they are practically the same design.. right down to manually controlled fuel elements. except for all we know, Fermi didn't burn his by purposely allowing a run-away.. and despite what these people say.. never has a run-away reaction been brought back into control.. every last one has burnt itself out naturally, from 3 mile island to windscale from fukishima to Chernobyl.
@@carpetmonk You're talking out of your ass. Only Chernobyl had a runaway reaction. Other accidents were caused by loss of cooling and meltdowns by decay heat, except that Three Miles Island had a containment that worked perfectly, and Fukushima had several reactors and spent fuel pools, was ravaged by a tsunami and still released fragment of radionuclides Chernobyl did, with its no-containment design. Do try to learn basics before talking about them...
Your forgetting that this accident occurred in a country whose motto is 'keep calm and carry on'. Honestly there are a lot of parallels between Windscale and Chernobyl from a state POV. The UK like most states has a habit of tending towards 'keeping a lid on it'. Good men and women are always the first victims. The state can never been seen to be 'part of the problem'. Arrogance abounds and always kills. Look at how the US treated soldiers in the Iraq war with soldiers being exposed to all sorts of horrible chemicals due to shoddy NBC suits and masks. Denial is a powerful political tool. My father was involved in the nuclear testing in the south pacific. He died from cancer. He was never told of the risks. The men and women involved sued the UK.GOV successfully decades later thankfully. This has happened before and it will happen again due to arrogance and pride and penny pinching. Just like NASA's space craft all these projects are built by the companies that provided the LOWEST quotes and not the BEST products/ideas/services.
It's better because Frank Leslie was still alive (?) when the BBC developed this documentary in the late 1980s. Either that or Frank Leslie was not consulted in 2006-2007?
I'm surprised they didn't catch the fact they were losing enriched uranium cartridges much sooner. Was there no inventory control comparing how many cartridges were placed in the reactor vs. how many were ejected into the water cooling trough? Seems like a pretty basic check to me.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
Dad died from nuclear contamination at a UK weapons test. His CMO had visited Japan to study those 2 explosions. The exposure of personnel was known and deliberate. Mum was compensated as long as she signed a gag order
I heard stories that some of the nuclear tests in Australia were conducted when the wind would carry the fallout over some isolated communities so the long-term effects could be monitored. I'm very sorry to hear about your father. Another casualty of creating weapons of mass destruction which can never be used.
I have confidence that the creation of nuclear weapons is the greatest incentive to diplomacy. If you don't want to get fried start talking .. The city of Adelaide ( 1 million inhabitants ) was in the direct path of the "dust" from Maralinga and Emu Plains. This was so obvious as to be a known outcome of those weapons tests. The Geiger counter on the top of the Adelaide University recorded the elevated levels of radiation with each blast. Since then (to this day) both the Australian and UK governments collect statistics on cancer increases. My father was willing to be subjected to extensive analysis and so my mother was given monetary compensation. All governments who use and test nuclear weapons want accurate statistics on their long term effects. The aboriginal communities in the direct path of fallout were lab rats since they refused to vacate the land. Radiation is insipide since you can't see it. To watch your father die by being fried from the inside out is a sober lesson in the destructive power of radiation. The gung-ho attitude of the people in this video is clear evidence of government propaganda even with the highly educated. I retain the 1000 page medical report on the cause of his death and live outside a city I know is a target. I would get 1 year before contamination in a nuclear strike and have already planned a suicide thereafter. I would never want to fry from the inside like may father did. But he is a testament to the mulling power of a large quantity of merlot
If it ever got to the point where multi-megaton weapons were falling on cities, the Mutually Assured Destruction principle would apply. There would be no stopping it. I think Einstein was right: ""I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." A long time ago I read or heard that the civilian population of Hiroshima always wondered why their city had been left unbombed. How about it was always intended to be the first nuclear target and "they" didn't want conventional bomb damage to be confused with nuclear blast effects? The same cold-blooded mentality as doing a long-term study of fallout effects on Australian populations, taken to the extreme. It's tragic what happened to your father and you have my sympathy.
@@EdwinHenryBlachford I am very sorry for the pain that you must suffer for the loss of your dad dying in that way. I lost my dad to leukemia. It was never proven that was due to him having worked underground at the coal face.?. Just breath this shit in and one day it will kill you but you won't be able to blame us when your gone attitude of the N.C.B.
I think we were kept in the dark for a long time about just how serious this accident and this plant was. ... maybe its time for the government to take responsibility for what their predecessors have caused..... and these workers deserve a medal for what they did to fight it!
No, you have it all wrong....the Government's idea was to wait and eventually it will go away....the people that would have made a claim would all be history by that time, so problem solved, nothing to pay out.
I find it amazing that some or the cartridges could go missing into the cooling ducts etc and that there was no accounting done to reconcile the number fed into the core and the number extracted. It's also incredible that the back of the reactor had not been designed to prevent cartridges from going into and remaining in the cooling ducts. Something as simple as a slope on the floor of the duct towards the water trough would have made that impossible.
@@ZilogBob Indeed. The 3-Mile Island accident shows that the nuclear industry is in some ways amazingly sloppy. The stuck valve that was a significant contributor to the problem could easily have been provided with a physical status indicator rather than a powered/de-powered indicator and, for such a critical component, should have been made fault tolerant as, for example, employing four valves in paralleled series pairs to ensure a single stuck open or stuck closed valve in the group does not cause an immediate system failure (if aquariums can employ this sort of precaution to valves and thermostats why not a nuclear reactor!).
@@ColinMill1 I remember back to not long after the accident reading that instrumentation was badly laid out and subject to misinterpretation, especially in an emergency situation. Aircraft systems have multiple redundancy and are designed to be fail safe, so you'd think that the nuclear power industry would be even more stringent with critical systems. I just read that there was no instrument to indicate the depth of the water in the reactor! No doubt a lot was learned from the TMI accident....
@@ZilogBob Yes, all the pictures of the control room give the impression of a rather haphazard collection of controls and displays distributed over a huge area of panels and it's not hard to imagine how hard this made understanding the situation when the thing went off piste.
@@ColinMill1 I remember reading that some critical instrumentation was on one side of a wall or divider, and associated instrumentation was on the other side. When seconds are crucial, diving back and forth between them to try to make sense of what's happening is the last thing you need. :-(
I'd go so far, that there even isn't an 'undercriticality'. The stuff - the fuel - his highly critial, from mining to disposal. No, there's also no disposal whatsoever, at least if language is used as it was intended to use. But there's a science by order of ideology, to rape language as effective as possible. Ask any politican or bankster, not just the physicists.
just like the lack of carbon content of the weapons of 500AD.. Then technology advanced.. there was nothing that could have been done to magically advance technology.. Hindsight, and the fact that it is over 60 years in the future, is affecting your perspective here.
@@brothermaleuspraetor9505 rubbish, they were simply in a hurry and didn't want to bother with proper safety precautions. Also the cost of water cooling or a containment vessel would be much higher.
@@Midnight_Rider96 Air-cooled reactors were much more expensive than water cooled.The dangers of graphite-core reactors were well known by 1950..of course, the Russians had the RMBK reactors-which resulted in Chernobyl.
A few decades earlier, instead of dumping it out, they could have charged extra for radioactive milk. Market it as an energy drink. All that energy will make them feel like they are 16 years old again.
"You didn't find uranium in your garden! YOU DIDN'T!!! Because it's not there!" Right, now that that is out of the way. Fantastic documentary, never heard of this til now.
So in plain English: they had no clue what they were doing, they had no idea what could go wrong and how to fix it and when a catastrophe hit, they did absolutely nothing. Great!
Hey you jerk! I'M a bloody American. Who the h*** you think you are?! (Laughs) >>: ) No, really, I agree. Build the stupid thing, & when it melts down or at least releases radioactive air & particulates, wait until cancer, leukemia, & birth defects in the local neighborhoods crescendo... Pretend you had a disaster management procedure when you didn't at all, find a fall guy/ pariah with which to distract the public from the real culprits... Last but not least, let all aforementioned disease CONTINUE tospread geometrically throughout the local communities, BUT NEVER HAVE TO PAY A CENT in health costs, lost wages, or any other legally recognized damages whatsoever. Didn't have to lift a finger, much less be pronounced a mass-murderer for such wickedness So bloody American, indeed... Makes me feel ashamed to be American, like the way George W. Bush made me embarrassed to be a Texan while he was president >: (
It was built this way for the same reason Chernobyl was built the way it was: the country was impoverished and couldn't afford to do it better, but was hell-bent on having nuclear reactors anyway.
For what it's worth, I can truly say that I was closer to the nuclear industry than the majority of those that just knew about the industry...…...in the early 70's as a fitter and turner I worked for 5 years for a firm in Bristol, Strachan & Henshaw of St Philips Marsh, and on the night and day shifts in number 3 factory machined the loading chambers for the fuel rods that sat on top of the reactor. The chambers were made of steel and looked like cotton reel bobbins but weighed approx. 11 tons each .These were stacked on their ends and bolted together with O rings sealing the faces. That is the tower you see in the videos. I worked on the loading chambers for Hinkley Point and Hunterston B nuclear plants and I now read that they are nearing their use by date......time flies. Strachan & Hernshaw are no more and the site has been converted to a commercial sales complex.
@@JustBlondie Yes, my fi5rst job when I went back to UK in the late 60's and now in OZ.......I believe they are decommissioning the Hunterston B reactor or so I read a while ago.
Ironically, IIRC they chose air-cooling because water cooling a graphite reactor was considered to be *more* dangerous (Hanford had apparently had problems of some sort with this); the presence of water raises the possibility of steam explosions a la Chernobyl.
thank you for educating me a lot of things go without being exposed properly. I am a woman and not one who just sits and thinks everything is so true ....I am on a big massive learning curve xxx thank you again
Like all things built in Britain, it leaked! My Triumph leaked oil constantly, so did my friend's Jaguar.... The only reason they didn't make TV sets is that they couldn't figure out how to make them leak!
Haven't they figured out how to make seals yet? The Triumphs were famous for leaking oil back in the 1970s when I was riding motorbikes (mainly Hondas).
Yep. Had a 68' Triumph Tiger ( predecessor and prototype for the legendary Bonneville). It leaked all the time, yet that was just assumed even when taking it in for service.
This accident isn’t very well known outside of Britain, perhaps not even there. I remember hearing zero comparisons at the times of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
It happened in 1957, long before those more recent accidents. This reactor was purely used for making nuclear weapons materials while the others were power generation reactors, so the authorities would have played it down.
1957...my first thought was; they really did push these plants promptly after the discovery of Atomic Technology. And simply for weapon development. Seems to me they were moving very aggressively with a dangerously, little known, technology.
There was a test-ban treaty approaching, that the British feared would make it vastly more difficult if not impossible to develop an independent nuclear weapon (after the UK helped develop the first A-bomb during the Manhattan Project, the USA clamped down on sharing nuclear technology with its allies after the war was over, and the exhausted UK basically had to either re-invent the damned thing all over again, or else go without); there was also panic when, no sooner had the UK developed an A-bomb of its own, the Americans unveiled the H-bomb and made the A-bomb "obsolete." That's why there was a mad scramble that overloaded the breeder reactors.
The designer of the plant,the atomic pile in particular DR or Professor Hinnden ?said he didn't have access to sufficient fresh water for cooling the pile and air flow would do the job.Without a desalination plant it would appear they were building a disaster from the start.
According to some estimates Windscale released nearly as much radiation as Chernobyl. Since it was a breeder reactor, it released different isotopes than Chernobyl so the effects were also quite different.
@Judy G.I read somewhere that after the first successful Russian nuclear test in Winter all the locals gathered around the crater to keep warm because the trees they used for firewood had all disappeared.
Cockcroft's Folly saved the day. Without those filters at the top of the reactor chimney then this incident would have been a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Well done sir for having the foresight to insist on this design detail. AGRs as a reactor design while efficient is only used in the UK. PWRs are a much more common design. Sellafield remains the most contaminated nuclear facility in Europe.
It is not mentioned in this documentary that he had to push very hard and make a huge fuss before it was very reluctantly agreed to retrofit filters to the chimneys. Without them, these reactors would have been radioactive snowblowers
It seems unlikely that they'd do that if they knew it was on fire. Maybe they just thought it was overheating from decay heat or Wigner energy release, in which case cooling it down would make sense.
Hadn’t they ever heard about “fanning the flames”, and these people were meant to be the brightest scientific minds of the era? Lol, wouldn’t trust them with a pair of safety scissors let alone a nuclear reactor. The Co2 could have worked if they had dumped it on masse into the core and kept dumping it in, in liquid form, making the fire turn it back to gaseous form, taking away the fires ability to sustain itself.
What sort of imbecile even considers the idea of an air cooled nuclear reactor? and then just exhausting the air into the atmosphere as well? a level of incompetence hard to describe.
Watching and listening to he unfolding crisis, the official assurances to "the public" make me wonder if some of the principal officers were graduates of "The Basil Fawlty School of Hotel and Nuclear Power Plant Management."
i think it was even before i went to primary school my mam and dad would now and again take me down to seascale to see, my uncle and aunt. They had 2 daughters and 1 son , Little Phillip, Although i was so young i still have strong memories about him we had a silly connection mentally wise to cause mischief, Not long after it was the first time i had seen my mam and dad in black clothes and i questioned them about it , i was told i had to stay with Nan for the day, Then Nan told me why they , Poor little Phil had passed away and gone to Heaven. Years later in my late teens i asked my mam what actually happened to him, Answer, Leukaemia . I will always think about you Little cuz . We will meet again buddy,il. see you on the land of fun and mischief
it was the early 70s i think it was certainly before i started school as i was born on 21st dec 1965 , i will call my auntie Louise and uncle Allan , i had not mentioned my memory about him until about 2 years ago , I asked His sister Lynn Was Phillip cremated or put to rest in the grave yard , she said Buerried and then she said how can you remember him , you were only about 3 or 4 , we had a bond even at that early age, he was a funny little guy playing hide n seek and things like that , i will call my uncle Allan and find out the exact date when he passed away, Thank you for your reply. Stephen Varah
You hear about the statistics of how many extra cases of cancer would have happened because of the radioactive contamination around Sellafield, but they are only numbers. Your very sad memories and story puts a human face onto the evil consequences of England putting nuclear weapons ahead of the health of its own people. I think you and Phil will eventually be together again and have more mischief. :)
Windscale was never a nuclear power plant. It didn't even strictly speaking have reactors, it had two nuclear *piles* that were used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. More specifically it was a more dangerous copy of the Hanford plant built for the Manhattan project and which produced the plutonium for amongst others the Trinity test and the Fatman bomb (i.e the type that was used on Nagasaki).
IMO, only a Fool would even get a job working that close to radioactive material. Being a Patriot is one thing, but being a Fool is something else. Being a Scientist is one thing, but being a Fool is something else. ... jkulik919@gmail.com
@paul austin I am glad America did not give you guys the technology. Imagine how worse you idiots would have screwed up if you had actual working plans. Britain did not have the resources to safely build what was needed so cut corners at every turn. Maybe when Brexit finally happens Britain can come out of third world status and contribute something useful to the world.
High pressure air and a super hot highly inflammable core made of graphite and uranium a metal that makes make magnesium look tame what could possible go wrong ?
@@ZilogBob yeah, before the lithium and magnesium this didn't sound TOO bad..the soviet union technically operated an air-cooled reactor safely for decades, though theirs was a low-power research reactor that was mostly only operated in pulses.
@@drewgehringer7813 Presumably they didn't run into the problem of Wigner energy and the need to let the core get way above normal operating temperature to try to release it....
This completely misses out the modifications to the fuel casings which were made through the requirement to make greater amounts of plutonium and tritrium
Just the fact they named it "The Pile" should have told the people that were stuck working there that some time, somehow, this giant experiment was doomed to turn to shit. Not literally of course but very best case you would end up tracking crap on your shoes.
As an ex control room operator myself who worked on on high risk plants at ICI , how the hell did the control room operators not hear or see the high radiation alarm was in on the vent stack, it was only spotted when the works manager went to look WTF ???
since the reactor was officially turned OFF, there might not have been anyone at the time in the control room. in those days things could be done that way.
Experts such as Wigner and Teller and maybe even Weinberg told them not to build an air cooled reactor as it is fundamentally unstable and it will eventually catch fire. Presumably the US had already done this and had the same thing happen. Knowing this, they built the reactor with no temperature probes in the core so the annealing process was purely guesswork. Not enough = fire as pent up Wigner energy is not released. Too much and it catches fire anyway. Thank goodness for Cockcroft, presumably he did listen.
@@jermainerace4156 Hanford reactor had "classic" control rods. I don't think you can have a fully passive large-scale reactor that is completely self-controlled.
There's a reasonably good one called the NetIO sold by pelorymate in ebay for about 50 pounds or so. You'll have to make a case for it yourself and power it from a battery box for example.
@@ZilogBobWhen I was a kid I had an alarm clock that had a loud Tick Tock.....my brother said it was reading the radio activity from some nuclear spill somewhere.
This was England's Chernobyl, with an even worse reactor design than Chernobyl's. I hope they borated the water they pumped into the core to put out the fire.
"in retrospect, that was not a very good idea..." Truer words were never spoken. In hindsight everything about this is horrifying to modern eyes. From the air cooled reactor venting all but openly to the environment, to the nuclear fuel canisters piling up in the vent shafts like wadded up pieces of paper missing the trash bucket, to the radiation protective gear seemingly made out of trash bags. "It's on fire! What should we do?" "Increase the air flow! That'll put it out fer sure!"... these were very very intelligent men. Physicists... operating a Nuclear Reactor! And through it all you have that uniquely British unflappable calm. "Hey Popy, I do believe the reactor is on fire." "Well that's bloody not so good. We should probably try and do something about it after Tea. Have they tried poking it with a stick? Or turning the fans all the way up to blow lots of fresh air on it yet?". And yeah I know the American's weren't much better and the Soviets were a thousand times worse. At least in the American and Soviets defense they each had vast barren stretches of uninhabited wasteland to fuck around in while fucking up. (OK the Demon Core might not have been a shining moment... I'll grant you!). But dear lord watching this in some ways is like watching an unmade Monty Python movie. And I know I'm being Judgmental through the 20/20 vision of history. But dear lord those immediate post war Nuclear Experiments are like watching Chimps With Hand Grenades.
i remember it on the news. My mother refused to let me go to school for over a week and we never lived anywhere near Calder hall in fact we lived nearly seventy miles away as the crow flies
A fine man, not many of his kind left now. All the men on the ground were hero's really. Although there was a lot of criticism after of how they handled the whole situation its easy to forget that when this happened nothing like this had occurred before, no one knew what to do.
I thought it was common(?) knowledge that water was used to put the fire out. Managers wanted to use CO2 (they had a tanker full of it) but were told that CO2 would be cracked and actually feed the fire. It was tried and it did. Water was the only option (even that could have been cracked) but enough was used to swamp the fire. Who knows what happened to the ground water. BTW, how much of the contamination (in UK) supposedly caused by Chernobyl was actually from WIndscale?
And who knows how much of those radioactive materials which got flushed into the Irish Sea by the 2M gallons of water wound up in the food chain and was consumed by the human population?
@@ZilogBob Oh yes! But on the other hand what about flying the Atlantic? Flight crews don't have higher cancer rates than anyone else yet they get a much higher background dose. London to NY = one chest X-ray. NY to Tokyo = 2 chest X-rays. Flight crews do that a number of times every week. How many X-rays does that add up to? Cancer patients get a massive X ray dose with the aim of killing tumour cells but they dont get other cancers as a result.
@@davidelliott5843 It makes also a difference if your exposed to background radiation, or if youget some material with alpha radiation into the body, by food or water. This material is hazardous, if it's inside the body.
Indeed, sir Ian Holm. I was blinded by entertainment. He was in a great spy film, the name of it escape, s me. A very good documentary here. I, m fascinated by nuclear power and how to control it. Thanks for your reply.
Nuclear power seems to be quite safe as long as it's implemented properly with all appropriate safeguards. France gets most of their power that way and we don't hear about nuclear accidents there. I had no idea Sir Ian Holm has been in so many films. Have a look at m.imdb.com/name/nm0000453/filmotype/actor and see if you can find the one you're thinking of!
It make me wonder how many people have died of illnesses caused by places like this. How many people got things like cancer and never knew the true cause because it was put down as natural causes and bad luck, quite a lot I should imagine.
I've heard stories that some of the nuclear tests in Australia were delayed until the winds would carry the fallout over some isolated remote communities so the "boffins" could get long-term data on the disease rates. The "experts" have absolutely no conscience about that kind of thing.
The other factor was the 80 pounds of polonium being cooked up in the isotope channels that went right up the stacks after being in the fire affected zone. Worse than plutonium for the human body.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
I'm 44, American, and never once heard of this incident ever until now. It frightening how many Chernobyls we've almost had. Thank you for posting this.
In the 1990's some protesters took sand from the beach near Windscale/ Sellafield, and dumped it at the Houses of Parliament. But because it was Radioactive, the government couldn't put it back, it had to be put in a special nuclear waste dump. (If I remember the story correctly)
I can't help but be reminded of the British penchant for "right, well you invented it but we perfected it". So, in this case, the design actually called for fuel rods to FREE FALL from tens of feet into a ditch full of water. Ok...
Did no one think to put a simple grate over the entrance of the air ducts so that the cartridges couldn't fall in there? A small lip hood would have done the job too, or just angle the entrance of the duct with the bottom further in than the top. Come on, Gents, it's not that difficult..
Well, yes, but of course that is also ignoring the larger stupidity of forced air cooling of the pile to start with let alone turning it off and allowing the pile to heat up and "burp" cool itself!
The fuel cans were supposed to fall into a water trough at the back of the reactor. But they screwed up the design so some cans got stuck on ledges, over-heated and burst.
Jim do you want to borrow my time machine to go back and tell them? Its in a carpark in Cambridge...the keys are hidden on a branch of a nearby tree...drop me a message and ill tell you where
The difference between this and chernobyl is that it was a plant solely created to make nuclear weapons, chernobyl provided power to about 5 million people.
Windscale was the British attempt to remain a "player" in the post war world even though the whole British colonial empire was gone, and they were beyond bankrupt as an economy.
and to a certain degree it worked, the uk is one of the permanent members of the UN security council for a reason, and being nuclear seems very much like one of them.
@@tireeandcoll2603 Why don't we promise to give them (E.U) Windscale in part exchange. It could sit on the Belgium/German border, that might do the trick.
Even if this documentary is about something serious, I don't blame the interviewee having a laugh at a situation in which he was dealing, especially when trying to explain how they tried- it did show how stupid some things, even to him in retrospect seemed. It is also good to see that the film-crew get emotional, first or close-hand opinions and accounts because it helps round out other people, which were involved, where you can understand it as a whole.
it amazes me there was no accountability regarding whatever was pushed out in the rear no count kept in order to know where the parts replaced, that's pretty trusting to not have a secondary filtration system in america every thing to do with a nuclear reactor is redundant, health physics instrumentation has come a long way since this happened
Do you remember when they changed the name from Windscale to Sellafield, that really sorted the safety problems once and for all.
LOL 🤣😂
The men wearing those pvc outfits & the dangerous work they had to do remind me a bit of those liquidators at Chernobyl.
I trained as an industrial radiographer in the early 1980s. As part of our training we looked at welds on pipes in then-old nuke power stations. The welds were terrible, and the cause of almost every minor/major leak back then.
So the glowing green liquid dripping from the ceiling in The Simpsons was really very close to the truth. Thanks for your comment.
@@ZilogBob Matt Groening denies it but Springfield nuclear power plant has some similarties to Oregon's first and only nuclear power plant, Trojan.
Leaks, corners cut on construction, turned out to be on a fault line...no wonder it didn't stay online for long.
@@drewgehringer7813 Nuclear technology is not very tolerant of cutting corners. If it goes wrong, it tends to go VERY wrong.
@@drewgehringer7813 well, the Army ran a few reactors. On the Dew line, where it leaked like a sieve, on a glacier in Greenland, where it also leaked like a sieve and SL-1, which exploded from a prompt critical condition generating sufficient steam hammer to physically lift the reactor vessel 10 feet.
After that, nobody trusted the Army with a nuclear reactor...
Most of the problems tracing back, like Windscale, to a totally shit design and implementation. At least he got scrubbers installed!
@martynjames5963 I'm working on a Music Technology PhD, some of my music and writing is concerned with the dualities of nuclear technology. I don't suppose you would mind a quick chat over email, I would love to include some of your insights. You can contact me through my youtube about page. Perhaps let me know here if you send an email, sometimes have junk folder issues.Humble Thanks.
For those not as old as me . . . This documentary about events just a dozen years after VE day has many echoes of wartime attitudes. The cavalier and jocular (or do I mean witless) attitude to danger. Improvisation; make do and mend; trial and error. Being part of the team (regardless of your misgivings). The importance of not letting the side down (even at the cost of endangering the local population). “Keeping mum.” The need to not let the cat out of the bag (or at least to suffocate it before it got to the PM).
I might add that even after this disaster, the job of being an atomic scientist carried a considerable social cachet -- not to mention a top salary.
Well, the root cause was from, then poorly understood, Wigner energy release. The ionizing radiation dislocated crystalline bonds, which interfered with the graphite's function as a moderator, so the reactor had to be run fairly hot to "anneal" the graphite, allowing the bonds to snap back to their normal configuration and when they did - release tons of heat.
Add in insufficient instrumentation to tell when hotspots formed, a fire was inevitable and recognized quite late.
I can just imagine the look on his face when he looked down from the scrubber gallery and saw flames licking up the rear of the reactor pile!
The amount of milk dumped into the sea still blows my mind!
@@adolflenin4973 I still shake my head over the amount of milk poured into the sea. Especially, given that a milk spill on land is a hazmat event. Milk from 500 km2 was diluted and poured into the sea. That's a lot of moo juice!
Which, between that and residue from the fire itself, contaminated clams and oysters in the Irish sea.
One underestimation can generate all kinds of merry hell!
@@spvillano COWS: You did WHAT????
That "Make do and Mend" mentality - it amazes me no one thought that was inappropriate to apply to atomic bombs and their breeder reactors. Push mower, OK sure. Submarine... maybe. Reactors - nope, figure it out completely first THEN build it. And figuring its OK to poison your own people as long as it enabled you to blow up the other guys.... Incomprehensible to me.
Of course our guys werent much smarter - making a nuclear reactor that you adjust the control rods MANUALLY (like, by HAND) and they were sticky, so you might have to give them a yank to adjust them but you only need to move it 2" and pulling a single rod 3" too far could cause prompt critical.
@@natehill8069 shhhh, they only told the bulls about it. ;)
I didn't think a documentary from the 90s could feel this scary, but here it is.
The ominous music, the sudden inversions of color, that fire effect overlaid on the shot of the fuel channels, and that menacing steam whistle.
I hadn't thought specifically about those effects but you're exactly right. Very consistent with how close they came to a major catastrophe.
@@ZilogBob The steam whistle especially, it reminds me of the siren from Silent Hill
@@twotailedavenger Yeah, it's got that lonely menacing kind of sound.
@@ZilogBob Front 242 type music. Look it up. From around the same era 1988/1990
BBC doc's are leagues ahead of everyone else in the 80's n 90's and 2000's + US docs where its fast loud flashy scene changes, odd metaphors and voice over repeating the same info 5 times before they move on just to make sure the lowest brain dead a-hole can follow along... 50mins of a doco with 5mins of information fleshed out as entertainment.
Use a fan to cool a fire, blacksmiths will object.
I worked in a specialist children's hospital in Newcastle, the Fleming Memorial Hospital, where we treated many children with rare deformities in the 80s and most of them were from the Seascale/Sellafield area. We were convinced that these rare conditions were the result of the Sellafield plant but government officials would not entertain our concerns and shoved it under the table.
Can you assemble some solid statistics which show a significant cluster of these types of abnormalities in that area? If you can, this is the kind of story which should be submitted to the investigative media. They love to expose cover-ups. I hope you can do that.
It must have been an even more difficult and distressing time for you, I feel ashamed that the truth of this terrible event has been suppressed by the governments during and after this incident, that is not a democratic way to run the country, in fact it is a defenceless deliberate act to lie to us. Thank you for your service to our country and more importantly to the innumerable number of children you treated and supported through possibly the worst time in their lives.
@@allandavis8201 almost certainly about money. The government of the day would be prosecuted for many millions£££. It would also be possible that full disclosure would damage the UKs international standing in the world..
Thankyou for posting your experience. I'm a newbie to this but there's a pdf report I found that only at the end concludes their sampling should have been specifically in the areas downwind of that tragedy, to focus rather on known contaminated ground than a much diluted 360deg scan which obviously must include areas that never rcd fallout. I've just started the Jean McSorley book this afternoon 'Living in the Shadow' and its full of official obfuscation and even trade union foot dragging. I was also surprised to read the wages were not high or in fact generous for the ordinary Cumbrians employed at the plant, scandalous considering the dangers and the overall huge amounts of money pumped into the place. Not keen on Tuohy either, I read here he would rather NOT see workers receive any compensation!
Grief! all you needed was Jimmy Savile to pay a visit
@30:58 “It wasn’t a very pleasant situation”
Gotta love that old British Understatement style.
"oh my , our reactor seems to be on fire , quickly blow it out with our massive fan , you can trust me i`m an engineer"
Anders F. Furthermore: "...Now don't you fear for anyone's safety. Everything's under control; just let fire crews douse the fire. Tea Time, old man?"
...Typical flippant, clinical detachment. Detachment from REALITY
Not quite the finest hour of British engineering.
hey by any chance are you an engineer?
He's just stating the bleedin obvious . . cool your pile
Reactor built by Lucas, perchance? 'Cause it would explain a lot.
was there ever one
@ But you do have to be a child to be unaware that we Brits have pioneered more things than any other nation.
It's interesting to compare this 1990 documentary to the one they did in 2007. There are a few divergences. For example, the 2007 documentary claims that the fire was extinguished by turning off the fans, while this earlier documentary states that water put it out. Other inconsistencies include the fact that the 2007 documentary hardly mentions the pollution that had occurred prior to the accident; and nor does it mention the damage to Cockcroft's filters and their ineffectiveness at preventing contamination escaping. I find it remarkable that two documentaries on the same subject can have such great differences! I believe more in this 1990 documentary for the simple reason that today there is no real reporting, It's either sensationalised to garner views or tapered to suit a particular interest. Back in the 1980s when this documentary was being put together, the BBC was an organisation that could be trusted to be very objective and unbiased in its reporting of these types of events. Those days are gone.
Totally agree.
No you're wrong, read any BBC article on their website and there's a link at the bottom on why you can trust the BBC. Of course it's written by the BBC, but you can trust them so, it's okay.
Nudge nudge, wink wink - say no more.
+Limitless Nothingness The shape of the containment structure depends on the type of reactor, but they're not specifically designed to protect against a terror attack. What you see from the outside is not the actual reactor vessel. For example, boiling water reactors use a square shaped secondary containment building that houses the cylindrical reactor vessel and suppression pools. On the other hand, pressurized water reactors use a spherical outer containment building. This houses both the cylindrical reactor vessel and pressurized steam generators.
The type of containment structure depends on how the reactor is designed to cope with accidents. In the case of boiling water reactors, the coolant flashes to steam and is ultimately condensed by the suppression pools where the pressure is relieved. If this fails, the pressure inside the reactor vessel builds to a critical point where it eventually explodes, like the reactors at Fukushima. In pressurized water reactors, the containment structure provides adequate volume for the steam to expand. In the Three Mile Island accident, this was a major concern as pressure inside the spherical outer containment building was at the limit. Radioactive steam was vented to atmosphere to relieve some of the pressure.
You got that right. Well said.
Another factor was that they clipped the cooling fins on the cartridges, making them run hotter: this was to improve plutonium yield. Then, later, they clipped even more off the fins to produce tritium for the H-bomb.
and still today they haven't learned their lesson... look at Fukushima who's the genius that built nuclear reactors on a major fault line. and decided to use saltwater Cooling...
@@honeybear8485 The entirety of Japan is on a faultline, what are they supposed to do? Also all of their nuclear plants have survived every Earthquake that has hit them, they just made a stupid decision to put backup generators below sea-level in the path of a tsunami. Stupidity was behind Fukushima, not an Earthquake.
@@honeybear8485 Olivia is a proud Brit!
BFI IS BETTER THAN oscar
Makes me wonder if British Leyland built this reactor, as is such a quality job.
If it were a BL creation it would've exploded.
America was lucky they made haphazzard piles that could have gotten out of hand experimenting with how to make a reaction and sustain it it was uncharted territory as the americans were not sharing knowledge just something to keep in mind
ha !! .... exc
Since it did not produce electricity, maybe it was built by Lucas.
@@ostrich67😂😂😂 now THAT was funny!
Everybody gangsta' til their reactor's on fire
Having just seen Chernobyl I’m struck by the similarities of scientists and engineers taking huge risks in order to please their political masters. This could easily have been another Chernobyl if the water had resulted in a hydrogen explosion.
Tom Tuohy was a real hero and one of the few to come out of this with any credit
All so true. Thanks for your comments!
Tuohy was blamed for the fire by the British establishment.
@@kesamek8537 Typical politicians blaming those who prevented a disaster for causing it in the first place.
Today was my father's funeral!! .. He died of Cancer!!😠😡👎🏽👎🏽
Graphite moderate reactors that use uranium, plutonium or both are inherently dangerous.
The soundtrack on this somehow manages to sound radioactive ....!!!!
I've never heard of a "air cooled reactor" before this.... It defy's logic.
University of Chicago, Shagg Stadium, 1942. First sustained nuclear reaction. Graphite and air. Enrico Fermi.
@@TheObersalzburg On 12 December 1942 CP-1's power output was increased to 200 W, enough to power a light bulb. Lacking shielding of any kind, it was a radiation hazard for everyone in the vicinity, and further testing was continued at 0.5 W.
I suppose one of the benefits is your coolant supply is inexhaustible and it’s simpler than having having to pump water as a coolant. Plenty of reasons not to do it that way of course but it was probably cheaper and faster to do it that way when there was no need to generate electricity.
@@Imp5011 That was the idea. Hanford Reactors would have blown up like a minichernobyl if the water supply failed.
well there's a problem with that, from people talking about explosion as shown in the accident the "infinite coolant" was completely USELESS when it was most needed, as a matter of fact it made things worse, there is no way an air cooled reactor is a good ideia, it may be simpler but it's so sketchy
Pushing the fuel cartridges out of the reactor by letting them fall in a heap on the floor is about as intelligent as using a bread knife to get your toast out of a plugged-in toaster!
No worries mate, down in OZ we have those earth leakage trips on our electical boards and if you jam your finger in the mains it trips out in microseconds.
honestly its not that different than what the U.S. did for project manhattan; B reactor, the world's first large-scale reactor intended for more than just research, worked similarly
it just used water cooling over air cooling, which it turns out is less safe.
Seriously? I'd compare it to handling hot coal with bare hands. Most people have tried using a knife to remove a piece of bread from a toaster.
YEP, ANY FOOL KNOWS YOU HAVE TO USE A FORK
Great British hightech
The entire cooling system that Windscale was using was suspect right from the get-go. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you shouldn't cool a nuclear reactor merely by blowing air through it and then exhausting that air straight out a smoke stack. Even when they finally decided to put a Scrubber at the top of the stack, the Scrubber was entirely inadequate and poorly designed. There's a reason why closed-circuit designs are typically used, and it's a mighty important one.
The scrubber was neither inadequate nor poorly designed.
Without it this accident would have been a catastrophe.
@@MostlyPennyCat Did you not watch the documentary? The filters never worked properly, and allowed uranium oxide dust to escape and contaminate the countryside.
@@MostlyPennyCat Oh, you nuclear power wonks. Better if we'd never built that shit. Better if Brits had lived out in the bogs in huts.
The AGR at Dungeness was gas cooled. Interestingly, the Magnox reactor on the same site functioned well long past it's designed life time!
It was the cold war and they wanted the nukes. This was a nuke factory, as stated in the documentary. 'Filters were an afterthought due to timescales'.
Calling it "the pile" makes it seem like it was built when Fermi built his "pile".
Thank you for posting this!
they are practically the same design.. right down to manually controlled fuel elements. except for all we know, Fermi didn't burn his by purposely allowing a run-away.. and despite what these people say.. never has a run-away reaction been brought back into control.. every last one has burnt itself out naturally, from 3 mile island to windscale from fukishima to Chernobyl.
jellyfishattack Same thing really just larger
Ernie Stars if you are talking about the Wignier release, they had already done plenty before that point, and successfully.
I mean, this is only a bit over a decade from Chicago Pile-1
And it is very much a heap of graphite with holes for fuel and control rods
@@carpetmonk You're talking out of your ass. Only Chernobyl had a runaway reaction. Other accidents were caused by loss of cooling and meltdowns by decay heat, except that Three Miles Island had a containment that worked perfectly, and Fukushima had several reactors and spent fuel pools, was ravaged by a tsunami and still released fragment of radionuclides Chernobyl did, with its no-containment design.
Do try to learn basics before talking about them...
6x doseage on children's shoes and the safety manager didn't consider it a hazard that 'we' the public should be informed of. Words fail me.
Your forgetting that this accident occurred in a country whose motto is 'keep calm and carry on'. Honestly there are a lot of parallels between Windscale and Chernobyl from a state POV. The UK like most states has a habit of tending towards 'keeping a lid on it'. Good men and women are always the first victims. The state can never been seen to be 'part of the problem'. Arrogance abounds and always kills. Look at how the US treated soldiers in the Iraq war with soldiers being exposed to all sorts of horrible chemicals due to shoddy NBC suits and masks. Denial is a powerful political tool. My father was involved in the nuclear testing in the south pacific. He died from cancer. He was never told of the risks. The men and women involved sued the UK.GOV successfully decades later thankfully. This has happened before and it will happen again due to arrogance and pride and penny pinching. Just like NASA's space craft all these projects are built by the companies that provided the LOWEST quotes and not the BEST products/ideas/services.
In the words of Phil Mason, "6 times bugger all is still bugger all".
6x is truly not horrifying.
This is a much better documentary than the one the BBC released in 2007.
Thanks. I'm surprised that I seem to be the only person to have kept a copy of it on VHS tape and uploaded it.
It's better because Frank Leslie was still alive (?) when the BBC developed this documentary in the late 1980s. Either that or Frank Leslie was not consulted in 2006-2007?
Good
10 Foot Man: Thanks for your good comments. :-) We need documentaries which try to stick to the facts without dramatising everything as they do now.
ZilogBob thank you very much in doing so. It is far better than the new doc.
I'm surprised they didn't catch the fact they were losing enriched uranium cartridges much sooner. Was there no inventory control comparing how many cartridges were placed in the reactor vs. how many were ejected into the water cooling trough? Seems like a pretty basic check to me.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
I spent a week at Sellafield recently and actually walked right past the chimney at Windscale, it's HUGE!
Puts a whole new spin on British Fission and Chips.
Nice one Centurion. Like it, like it.
OK..... THAT was funny! :-)
You just went and made me hungry
Might have to do that for dinner and then sit on the lawn.
@Alweg Fan Don't bring John,Paul, George and Ringo into it.
Dad died from nuclear contamination at a UK weapons test. His CMO had visited Japan to study those 2 explosions. The exposure of personnel was known and deliberate. Mum was compensated as long as she signed a gag order
I heard stories that some of the nuclear tests in Australia were conducted when the wind would carry the fallout over some isolated communities so the long-term effects could be monitored. I'm very sorry to hear about your father. Another casualty of creating weapons of mass destruction which can never be used.
I have confidence that the creation of nuclear weapons is the greatest incentive to diplomacy. If you don't want to get fried start talking .. The city of Adelaide ( 1 million inhabitants ) was in the direct path of the "dust" from Maralinga and Emu Plains. This was so obvious as to be a known outcome of those weapons tests. The Geiger counter on the top of the Adelaide University recorded the elevated levels of radiation with each blast. Since then (to this day) both the Australian and UK governments collect statistics on cancer increases. My father was willing to be subjected to extensive analysis and so my mother was given monetary compensation. All governments who use and test nuclear weapons want accurate statistics on their long term effects. The aboriginal communities in the direct path of fallout were lab rats since they refused to vacate the land. Radiation is insipide since you can't see it. To watch your father die by being fried from the inside out is a sober lesson in the destructive power of radiation. The gung-ho attitude of the people in this video is clear evidence of government propaganda even with the highly educated. I retain the 1000 page medical report on the cause of his death and live outside a city I know is a target. I would get 1 year before contamination in a nuclear strike and have already planned a suicide thereafter. I would never want to fry from the inside like may father did. But he is a testament to the mulling power of a large quantity of merlot
If it ever got to the point where multi-megaton weapons were falling on cities, the Mutually Assured Destruction principle would apply. There would be no stopping it. I think Einstein was right: ""I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
A long time ago I read or heard that the civilian population of Hiroshima always wondered why their city had been left unbombed. How about it was always intended to be the first nuclear target and "they" didn't want conventional bomb damage to be confused with nuclear blast effects? The same cold-blooded mentality as doing a long-term study of fallout effects on Australian populations, taken to the extreme.
It's tragic what happened to your father and you have my sympathy.
@@ZilogBob I believe the 3rd war will be a biological contamination .. humanitarian disaster .. demonic technology 😠😡👹👺💩💩💩
@@EdwinHenryBlachford I am very sorry for the pain that you must suffer for the loss of your dad dying in that way. I lost my dad to leukemia. It was never proven that was due to him having worked underground at the coal face.?. Just breath this shit in and one day it will kill you but you won't be able to blame us when your gone attitude of the N.C.B.
the ghosting of the images of the cooling towers and the exhaust tower add a little something to this documentary for me
That's the first time poor TV reception has actually enhanced a documentary!
This is so profoundly terrifying.
Sturm The Regulator only if your sane
What do you know you're a plane
How much contamination are we actually living in on Earth in 2019?? .. This is some bullshit!! .. My father just died from CANCER!!!
😡😠👎🏽👎🏽
What does that word mean?
I think we were kept in the dark for a long time about just how serious this accident and this plant was. ... maybe its time for the government to take responsibility for what their predecessors have caused..... and these workers deserve a medal for what they did to fight it!
No, you have it all wrong....the Government's idea was to wait and eventually it will go away....the people that would have made a claim would all be history by that time, so problem solved, nothing to pay out.
@@gangleweed Terrific
I find it amazing that some or the cartridges could go missing into the cooling ducts etc and that there was no accounting done to reconcile the number fed into the core and the number extracted. It's also incredible that the back of the reactor had not been designed to prevent cartridges from going into and remaining in the cooling ducts. Something as simple as a slope on the floor of the duct towards the water trough would have made that impossible.
Totally agree. It demonstrates just how many corners were cut in their insane rush to create a nuclear weapon.
@@ZilogBob Indeed. The 3-Mile Island accident shows that the nuclear industry is in some ways amazingly sloppy. The stuck valve that was a significant contributor to the problem could easily have been provided with a physical status indicator rather than a powered/de-powered indicator and, for such a critical component, should have been made fault tolerant as, for example, employing four valves in paralleled series pairs to ensure a single stuck open or stuck closed valve in the group does not cause an immediate system failure (if aquariums can employ this sort of precaution to valves and thermostats why not a nuclear reactor!).
@@ColinMill1 I remember back to not long after the accident reading that instrumentation was badly laid out and subject to misinterpretation, especially in an emergency situation. Aircraft systems have multiple redundancy and are designed to be fail safe, so you'd think that the nuclear power industry would be even more stringent with critical systems. I just read that there was no instrument to indicate the depth of the water in the reactor! No doubt a lot was learned from the TMI accident....
@@ZilogBob Yes, all the pictures of the control room give the impression of a rather haphazard collection of controls and displays distributed over a huge area of panels and it's not hard to imagine how hard this made understanding the situation when the thing went off piste.
@@ColinMill1 I remember reading that some critical instrumentation was on one side of a wall or divider, and associated instrumentation was on the other side. When seconds are crucial, diving back and forth between them to try to make sense of what's happening is the last thing you need. :-(
The is no such thing as a “minor emergency” with nuclear material.
Captain Obvious -
I'd go so far, that there even isn't an 'undercriticality'. The stuff - the fuel - his highly critial, from mining to disposal. No, there's also no disposal whatsoever, at least if language is used as it was intended to use. But there's a science by order of ideology, to rape language as effective as possible. Ask any politican or bankster, not just the physicists.
LCdrDerrick, I entirely agree. No “Minor Emergencies” in a submerged sub either-just ask the ghosts of the Thresher and Kursk (to name but two).
@@bigbuck3216 Sadly there would still be people disagreeing with that
Air cooled Reactors are akin to ash trays on motorbikes.............
Good analogy!
just like the lack of carbon content of the weapons of 500AD.. Then technology advanced.. there was nothing that could have been done to magically advance technology.. Hindsight, and the fact that it is over 60 years in the future, is affecting your perspective here.
@@brothermaleuspraetor9505 rubbish, they were simply in a hurry and didn't want to bother with proper safety precautions. Also the cost of water cooling or a containment vessel would be much higher.
HistoPixel Productions I used to smoke on my motorcycle, however, I never bothered using the ashtray.
@@Midnight_Rider96 Air-cooled reactors were much more expensive than water cooled.The dangers of graphite-core reactors were well known by 1950..of course, the Russians had the RMBK reactors-which resulted in Chernobyl.
A few decades earlier, instead of dumping it out, they could have charged extra for radioactive milk. Market it as an energy drink. All that energy will make them feel like they are 16 years old again.
A sort of Red Cow energy drink, rather than Red Bull!
"You didn't find uranium in your garden! YOU DIDN'T!!! Because it's not there!"
Right, now that that is out of the way. Fantastic documentary, never heard of this til now.
Thanks! 😁
(PROJECTILE VOMIT, FAINTS)
So in plain English: they had no clue what they were doing, they had no idea what could go wrong and how to fix it and when a catastrophe hit, they did absolutely nothing. Great!
So American!
Hey you jerk! I'M a bloody American. Who the h*** you think you are?! (Laughs) >>: )
No, really, I agree. Build the stupid thing, & when it melts down or at least releases radioactive air & particulates, wait until cancer, leukemia, & birth defects in the local neighborhoods crescendo...
Pretend you had a disaster management procedure when you didn't at all, find a fall guy/ pariah with which to distract the public from the real culprits...
Last but not least, let all aforementioned disease CONTINUE tospread geometrically throughout the local communities, BUT NEVER HAVE TO PAY A CENT in health costs, lost wages, or any other legally recognized damages whatsoever. Didn't have to lift a finger, much less be pronounced a mass-murderer for such wickedness
So bloody American, indeed... Makes me feel ashamed to be American, like the way George W. Bush made me embarrassed to be a Texan while he was president >: (
@@magnificentmuttley154 Well, the Russians did pretty much the same thing...
@@sherryburrows882 When it comes to 'getting ahead' in an arms race, any country will do it. it's a bit pathetic really :(
@ From about the mid 18th century until 1900s?
Tom Tuohy died in 2008 in his 91st year. Despite an unknown, but likely very high, radiation exposure.
Wow, who would have guessed that if you ignore engineers and prefer not to take their advice it might lead to disasters.
Every time there is an industrial accident the standard line is "The Contamination Is So Low It Posses No Harm To The Public!"
In 99% of cases, it's true.
31:25 that was really interesting that he described the fire as a living breathing entity.
Honestly it's hard to believe anybody thought this sort of design was a good idea.
It was built this way for the same reason Chernobyl was built the way it was: the country was impoverished and couldn't afford to do it better, but was hell-bent on having nuclear reactors anyway.
For what it's worth, I can truly say that I was closer to the nuclear industry than the majority of those that just knew about the industry...…...in the early 70's as a fitter and turner I worked for 5 years for a firm in Bristol, Strachan & Henshaw of St Philips Marsh, and on the night and day shifts in number 3 factory machined the loading chambers for the fuel rods that sat on top of the reactor. The chambers were made of steel and looked like cotton reel bobbins but weighed approx. 11 tons each .These were stacked on their ends and bolted together with O rings sealing the faces. That is the tower you see in the videos. I worked on the loading chambers for Hinkley Point and Hunterston B nuclear plants and I now read that they are nearing their use by date......time flies. Strachan & Hernshaw are no more and the site has been converted to a commercial sales complex.
Interesting. Thanks for that.
Is this really true? Obviously you’re going to say yes so I don’t know why I’m asking, I guess it’s my innocent side
@@JustBlondie Yes, my fi5rst job when I went back to UK in the late 60's and now in OZ.......I believe they are decommissioning the Hunterston B reactor or so I read a while ago.
Love how the vintage footages give flesh to the story. Very nice documentary 👍❤🖖
Wind cooled madness. Thanks for the upload...
You're most welcome. :-)
Ironically, IIRC they chose air-cooling because water cooling a graphite reactor was considered to be *more* dangerous (Hanford had apparently had problems of some sort with this); the presence of water raises the possibility of steam explosions a la Chernobyl.
Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it, especially when, at any moment, we lose control of something so deadly.
thank you for educating me a lot of things go without being exposed properly. I am a woman and not one who just sits and thinks everything is so true ....I am on a big massive learning curve xxx thank you again
Glad you found it educational. If you want to know how the system really works, watch the "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" TV series.
Like all things built in Britain, it leaked! My Triumph leaked oil constantly, so did my friend's Jaguar.... The only reason they didn't make TV sets is that they couldn't figure out how to make them leak!
Haven't they figured out how to make seals yet? The Triumphs were famous for leaking oil back in the 1970s when I was riding motorbikes (mainly Hondas).
TheMajixxboxx .LOL..Best one this month...Congrats
Yep. Had a 68' Triumph Tiger ( predecessor and prototype for the legendary Bonneville). It leaked all the time, yet that was just assumed even when taking it in for service.
My Land Rover leaks oil like crazy, I had the gaskets replaced 3 times within 8 years.
LOL! Very true.
This accident isn’t very well known outside of Britain, perhaps not even there. I remember hearing zero comparisons at the times of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima.
It happened in 1957, long before those more recent accidents. This reactor was purely used for making nuclear weapons materials while the others were power generation reactors, so the authorities would have played it down.
I am amazed and impressed by the scientists look and being handsome. They all look like james bond. They are all looks great.
1957...my first thought was; they really did push these plants promptly after the discovery of Atomic Technology. And simply for weapon development. Seems to me they were moving very aggressively with a dangerously, little known, technology.
Yeah well that's how you make progress, onwards and upwards 😑
There was a test-ban treaty approaching, that the British feared would make it vastly more difficult if not impossible to develop an independent nuclear weapon (after the UK helped develop the first A-bomb during the Manhattan Project, the USA clamped down on sharing nuclear technology with its allies after the war was over, and the exhausted UK basically had to either re-invent the damned thing all over again, or else go without); there was also panic when, no sooner had the UK developed an A-bomb of its own, the Americans unveiled the H-bomb and made the A-bomb "obsolete." That's why there was a mad scramble that overloaded the breeder reactors.
Why didn't anyone pay attention to Edward Teller?! When the Father of the H Bomb tells you that your plant's design is not safe.....
You could ask that of the EBR, the SRE, the SL1, the SNAP 8s, and of course the massive controversy around the GE MK1.
jellyfishattack also, that was pre-H bomb.
The designer of the plant,the atomic pile in particular DR or Professor Hinnden ?said he didn't have access to sufficient fresh water for cooling the pile and air flow would do the job.Without a desalination plant it would appear they were building a disaster from the start.
Maybe politics, but if you are on the way with building already, obvious loss of face like other countries.
It's not ignorance the it's selfish pride and neglect
this is facinating stuff. Thank you for posting.
You're welcome. No one else seems to have kept a copy of it on VHS tape and it's a good documentary.
According to some estimates Windscale released nearly as much radiation as Chernobyl.
Since it was a breeder reactor, it released different isotopes than Chernobyl so the effects were also quite different.
@Judy G.I read somewhere that after the first successful Russian nuclear test in Winter all the locals gathered around the crater to keep warm because the trees they used for firewood had all disappeared.
Cockcroft's Folly saved the day. Without those filters at the top of the reactor chimney then this incident would have been a catastrophic nuclear disaster. Well done sir for having the foresight to insist on this design detail. AGRs as a reactor design while efficient is only used in the UK. PWRs are a much more common design. Sellafield remains the most contaminated nuclear facility in Europe.
It is not mentioned in this documentary that he had to push very hard and make a huge fuss before it was very reluctantly agreed to retrofit filters to the chimneys. Without them, these reactors would have been radioactive snowblowers
our reactor is on fire
sombody: "MORE AIR that will put it out"
Science: "hold up"
It seems unlikely that they'd do that if they knew it was on fire. Maybe they just thought it was overheating from decay heat or Wigner energy release, in which case cooling it down would make sense.
Right! That made me cringe! "The reactor is on fire?!, Well I know what to do, give it more air!" 😂😂👍
Hadn’t they ever heard about “fanning the flames”, and these people were meant to be the brightest scientific minds of the era? Lol, wouldn’t trust them with a pair of safety scissors let alone a nuclear reactor. The Co2 could have worked if they had dumped it on masse into the core and kept dumping it in, in liquid form, making the fire turn it back to gaseous form, taking away the fires ability to sustain itself.
Perhaps try to nuke it? The shock way of the nuclear explosion might put the flames out.
What sort of imbecile even considers the idea of an air cooled nuclear reactor?
and then just exhausting the air into the atmosphere as well?
a level of incompetence hard to describe.
"I'm a bit concerned..."
Watching and listening to he unfolding crisis, the official assurances to "the public" make me wonder if some of the principal officers were graduates of "The Basil Fawlty School of Hotel and Nuclear Power Plant Management."
Que?
More like basil brush boom boom
@@ishavewookies5617 More like broom, broom. Let's sweep this problem under the carpet.
i think it was even before i went to primary school my mam and dad would now and again take me down to seascale to see, my uncle and aunt. They had 2 daughters and 1 son , Little Phillip, Although i was so young i still have strong memories about him we had a silly connection mentally wise to cause mischief, Not long after it was the first time i had seen my mam and dad in black clothes and i questioned them about it , i was told i had to stay with Nan for the day, Then Nan told me why they , Poor little Phil had passed away and gone to Heaven. Years later in my late teens i asked my mam what actually happened to him, Answer, Leukaemia . I will always think about you Little cuz . We will meet again buddy,il. see you on the land of fun and mischief
stephen varah
What time period was this? I am so sorry about your cousin.
it was the early 70s i think it was certainly before i started school as i was born on 21st dec 1965 , i will call my auntie Louise and uncle Allan , i had not mentioned my memory about him until about 2 years ago , I asked His sister Lynn Was Phillip cremated or put to rest in the grave yard , she said Buerried and then she said how can you remember him , you were only about 3 or 4 , we had a bond even at that early age, he was a funny little guy playing hide n seek and things like that , i will call my uncle Allan and find out the exact date when he passed away, Thank you for your reply. Stephen Varah
Sorry I'm reading your comments so long after you left them, Stephen. You have my sincere sympathy. Thank you for sharing with the rest of us.
Hey its ok Buddy, at least we have memories to cherish , Thank you for your reply
You hear about the statistics of how many extra cases of cancer would have happened because of the radioactive contamination around Sellafield, but they are only numbers. Your very sad memories and story puts a human face onto the evil consequences of England putting nuclear weapons ahead of the health of its own people. I think you and Phil will eventually be together again and have more mischief. :)
Two things you never want to have in the same sentence:
“Nuclear power”
And
“Improvised solution”
[FACEPALM]
What solution to any technical problem is not improvised? Even the theory of evolution has genetic improvisation at its very root.
I mean, there has to be a first time for everything. It's not like humans have had nuclear power since the stone age.
Windscale was never a nuclear power plant. It didn't even strictly speaking have reactors, it had two nuclear *piles* that were used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. More specifically it was a more dangerous copy of the Hanford plant built for the Manhattan project and which produced the plutonium for amongst others the Trinity test and the Fatman bomb (i.e the type that was used on Nagasaki).
IMO, only a Fool would even get a job working that close to radioactive material.
Being a Patriot is one thing, but being a Fool is something else.
Being a Scientist is one thing, but being a Fool is something else. ... jkulik919@gmail.com
They should build a pure oxygen cooled reactor with grenades hidden throughout next.
There are liquid-sodium cooled reactors which strike me as comparable to that
@paul austin, Too bad we "yanks" basically own the world, eh?
Yes, and let's be sure to purge it with hydrogen before start up.
@paul austin I am glad America did not give you guys the technology. Imagine how worse you idiots would have screwed up if you had actual working plans. Britain did not have the resources to safely build what was needed so cut corners at every turn. Maybe when Brexit finally happens Britain can come out of third world status and contribute something useful to the world.
Let's put piles of uranium in walls...
An interesting documentary, thank you for posting.
You're welcome. I seem to be the only person who kept a copy on VHS tape. I think it's important that it's available for everyone to see. :)
High pressure air and a super hot highly inflammable core made of graphite and uranium a metal that makes make magnesium look tame what could possible go wrong ?
Then there was the lithium and magnesium also in the cartridges with the highly radioactive uranium....
@@ZilogBob yeah, before the lithium and magnesium this didn't sound TOO bad..the soviet union technically operated an air-cooled reactor safely for decades, though theirs was a low-power research reactor that was mostly only operated in pulses.
@@drewgehringer7813 Presumably they didn't run into the problem of Wigner energy and the need to let the core get way above normal operating temperature to try to release it....
"you know you're 'gonna have a bad day when you hear these words......"
WOW.!!! what a total eyeopener. best windscale documentary i have seen..!!!
Watch it again and again it's like a sponge sucking up water every time e I watch it new bits appear 8 new bits this viewing a d that 2 years ago
This completely misses out the modifications to the fuel casings which were made through the requirement to make greater amounts of plutonium and tritrium
Just the fact they named it "The Pile" should have told the people that were stuck working there that some time, somehow, this giant experiment was doomed to turn to shit. Not literally of course but very best case you would end up tracking crap on your shoes.
Pile was the regular name for a reactor back at that time... Look up Chicago pile one to know why
Got to be a brave person just to work in one of these. These workers are some of the non war time heros of society :-) :-)
Terry Allen Yes! Think it was 3 Soviet Heroes that lost their lives by saving Chernobyl disaster from GOING GLOBAL!
God bless the 3 Soviet souls for saving who knows how many lives :'( :-)
As an ex control room operator myself who worked on on high risk plants at ICI , how the hell did the control room operators not hear or see the high radiation alarm was in on the vent stack, it was only spotted when the works manager went to look WTF ???
since the reactor was officially turned OFF, there might not have been anyone at the time in the control room. in those days things could be done that way.
Experts such as Wigner and Teller and maybe even Weinberg told them not to build an air cooled reactor as it is fundamentally unstable and it will eventually catch fire. Presumably the US had already done this and had the same thing happen.
Knowing this, they built the reactor with no temperature probes in the core so the annealing process was purely guesswork. Not enough = fire as pent up Wigner energy is not released. Too much and it catches fire anyway.
Thank goodness for Cockcroft, presumably he did listen.
How does it all work I find it fascinating
What's vigna energy
@@jermainerace4156
Hanford reactor had "classic" control rods. I don't think you can have a fully passive large-scale reactor that is completely self-controlled.
A air cooled reactor you say? Now that's a sound idea.
Yes. You can keep the reactor from overheating and spray the surrounding farm land with uranium oxide particles all at the same time.
Santa, i know i said i wanted a metal detector for Christmas - changed my mind, i want a Geiger counter.
There's a reasonably good one called the NetIO sold by pelorymate in ebay for about 50 pounds or so. You'll have to make a case for it yourself and power it from a battery box for example.
Santa gets a lot of requests for those from that part of England... and Kiev... and Fukishima.
@@benbaselet2026 Thanks for that info. It looks like a well designed device and I might get one, or one similar to it.
@@ZilogBobWhen I was a kid I had an alarm clock that had a loud Tick Tock.....my brother said it was reading the radio activity from some nuclear spill somewhere.
@@gangleweed If you live near one of the nuclear contamination areas, he might have been right!
This was England's Chernobyl, with an even worse reactor design than Chernobyl's. I hope they borated the water they pumped into the core to put out the fire.
England?
"in retrospect, that was not a very good idea..." Truer words were never spoken. In hindsight everything about this is horrifying to modern eyes. From the air cooled reactor venting all but openly to the environment, to the nuclear fuel canisters piling up in the vent shafts like wadded up pieces of paper missing the trash bucket, to the radiation protective gear seemingly made out of trash bags. "It's on fire! What should we do?" "Increase the air flow! That'll put it out fer sure!"... these were very very intelligent men. Physicists... operating a Nuclear Reactor! And through it all you have that uniquely British unflappable calm. "Hey Popy, I do believe the reactor is on fire." "Well that's bloody not so good. We should probably try and do something about it after Tea. Have they tried poking it with a stick? Or turning the fans all the way up to blow lots of fresh air on it yet?". And yeah I know the American's weren't much better and the Soviets were a thousand times worse. At least in the American and Soviets defense they each had vast barren stretches of uninhabited wasteland to fuck around in while fucking up. (OK the Demon Core might not have been a shining moment... I'll grant you!). But dear lord watching this in some ways is like watching an unmade Monty Python movie. And I know I'm being Judgmental through the 20/20 vision of history. But dear lord those immediate post war Nuclear Experiments are like watching Chimps With Hand Grenades.
That's what happens when making a nuclear weapon is more important than the health of an entire community, to the politicians safely down in London.
Read up on "the green run" done at Hanford as they tried to figure out how Russia produced their bomb so quickly.
i remember it on the news. My mother refused to let me go to school for over a week and we never lived anywhere near Calder hall in fact we lived nearly seventy miles away as the crow flies
Thanks for this great post
You're welcome. I'm glad you found it interesting. :)
If Edward Teller tells you something is too dangerous, you should listen.
After all, he created the most dangerous things ever made.
I had to do a double-take when I heard *air cooled.* lol Wow. I didn't even think it was possible.
All the better to blow radioactive particles all over the surrounding farming land.
At 23:34... Works Manager ol' Tom Hughes still had that 1,000 yard stare after all those years
"they carried out the job they were meant to do". fucking chilling.
still amazing folk
Tom Tuohy was a Hero.
I totally agree.
A fine man, not many of his kind left now.
All the men on the ground were hero's really.
Although there was a lot of criticism after of how they handled the whole situation its easy to forget that when this happened nothing like this had occurred before, no one knew what to do.
I thought it was common(?) knowledge that water was used to put the fire out. Managers wanted to use CO2 (they had a tanker full of it) but were told that CO2 would be cracked and actually feed the fire. It was tried and it did. Water was the only option (even that could have been cracked) but enough was used to swamp the fire. Who knows what happened to the ground water.
BTW, how much of the contamination (in UK) supposedly caused by Chernobyl was actually from WIndscale?
And who knows how much of those radioactive materials which got flushed into the Irish Sea by the 2M gallons of water wound up in the food chain and was consumed by the human population?
@@ZilogBob Oh yes!
But on the other hand what about flying the Atlantic? Flight crews don't have higher cancer rates than anyone else yet they get a much higher background dose. London to NY = one chest X-ray. NY to Tokyo = 2 chest X-rays. Flight crews do that a number of times every week. How many X-rays does that add up to?
Cancer patients get a massive X ray dose with the aim of killing tumour cells but they dont get other cancers as a result.
@@davidelliott5843 It makes also a difference if your exposed to background radiation, or if youget some material with alpha radiation into the body, by food or water. This material is hazardous, if it's inside the body.
Indeed, sir Ian Holm. I was blinded by entertainment. He was in a great spy film, the name of it escape, s me. A very good documentary here. I, m fascinated by nuclear power and how to control it. Thanks for your reply.
Nuclear power seems to be quite safe as long as it's implemented properly with all appropriate safeguards. France gets most of their power that way and we don't hear about nuclear accidents there. I had no idea Sir Ian Holm has been in so many films. Have a look at m.imdb.com/name/nm0000453/filmotype/actor and see if you can find the one you're thinking of!
It make me wonder how many people have died of illnesses caused by places like this. How many people got things like cancer and never knew the true cause because it was put down as natural causes and bad luck, quite a lot I should imagine.
I've heard stories that some of the nuclear tests in Australia were delayed until the winds would carry the fallout over some isolated remote communities so the "boffins" could get long-term data on the disease rates. The "experts" have absolutely no conscience about that kind of thing.
National Security is a threat to National security.
Who would have thought starving a conventional fire of oxygen would help put it out, no that can’t right, let’s just keep the fans on. Scary stuff!
A spot of tea before we put out the reactor fire old man??
That's the ticket, what?
"Keep calm and have a cup of tea" seems to have prevailed back then.
@@gorillaau I,m putting it t' union I demand a smoke break every 1/2 hour, Calms nerv's yu know. F knows or cares what arm it does t' lungs
I wonder if the lump on the safety guys head has anything to do with radiation
You're not the only one...
The other factor was the 80 pounds of polonium being cooked up in the isotope channels that went right up the stacks after being in the fire affected zone. Worse than plutonium for the human body.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
Die Klimaforscher Prof. Phil Jones und Prof. Michael Mann (beide IPCC) haben in ihrer bekannten Hockeyschlägerkurve der Erderwärmung, den Temperaturrückgang seit dem Jahr 2000 mithilfe von Baumringdaten unterschlagen. Als dies in 2009/2010 herauskam, hat sogar Prof. Mojib Latif diese Trickserei eingestanden.
Radioactive Stan is my new hero.
Especially his beautiful dialect
I'm 44, American, and never once heard of this incident ever until now. It frightening how many Chernobyls we've almost had. Thank you for posting this.
Thanks! It seems that I'm the only person who kept an old VHS copy of the program and put it on UA-cam.
In the 1990's some protesters took sand from the beach near Windscale/ Sellafield, and dumped it at the Houses of Parliament. But because it was Radioactive, the government couldn't put it back, it had to be put in a special nuclear waste dump. (If I remember the story correctly)
More I watch this the more I ask how the hell do you air cool a reactor. Sounds like they already knew it wouldn't work, but did it anyway.
You cant. The 'elephants foot' at Chernobyl is busy working it's way to the Earth's core right now
I can't help but be reminded of the British penchant for "right, well you invented it but we perfected it". So, in this case, the design actually called for fuel rods to FREE FALL from tens of feet into a ditch full of water. Ok...
Bill Isaacs it's the other way round, Britain tended to invent things whilst other countries protect them.
US plutonium production worked the same way, you push a fresh rod in from the front, spent rod falls out from the back and lands in water.
😂The beginnings of the US atomic weapons program were given to the US by the UK due to concerns of invasion by Germany.
Did no one think to put a simple grate over the entrance of the air ducts so that the cartridges couldn't fall in there? A small lip hood would have done the job too, or just angle the entrance of the duct with the bottom further in than the top. Come on, Gents, it's not that difficult..
Well, yes, but of course that is also ignoring the larger stupidity of forced air cooling of the pile to start with let alone turning it off and allowing the pile to heat up and "burp" cool itself!
The fuel cans were supposed to fall into a water trough at the back of the reactor. But they screwed up the design so some cans got stuck on ledges, over-heated and burst.
Jim do you want to borrow my time machine to go back and tell them? Its in a carpark in Cambridge...the keys are hidden on a branch of a nearby tree...drop me a message and ill tell you where
Ed Rooney am I looking for a silver delorean?
The difference between this and chernobyl is that it was a plant solely created to make nuclear weapons, chernobyl provided power to about 5 million people.
Windscale was the British attempt to remain a "player" in the post war world even though the whole British colonial empire was gone, and they were beyond bankrupt as an economy.
and to a certain degree it worked, the uk is one of the permanent members of the UN security council for a reason, and being nuclear seems very much like one of them.
So Brexit....
@@tireeandcoll2603 Why don't we promise to give them (E.U) Windscale in part exchange. It could sit on the Belgium/German border, that might do the trick.
The British Empire still existed in the 50s, but it was already wobbling an awful lot, because it was, indeed, absolutely broke after the war.
Even if this documentary is about something serious, I don't blame the interviewee having a laugh at a situation in which he was dealing, especially when trying to explain how they tried- it did show how stupid some things, even to him in retrospect seemed. It is also good to see that the film-crew get emotional, first or close-hand opinions and accounts because it helps round out other people, which were involved, where you can understand it as a whole.
I know that's right
it amazes me there was no accountability regarding whatever was pushed out in the rear no count kept in order to know where the parts replaced, that's pretty trusting to not have a secondary filtration system in america every thing to do with a nuclear reactor is redundant, health physics instrumentation has come a long way since this happened
Thank you for this ❤
Thanks. Glad you found it interesting. 👍
Funny that our Government said a lot of the Chernobyl fallout fell around Windscale.
I like their choice of evil background music!
It sounds very "ominous", doesn't it?
We're called sheeple for a reason you know.
"Mushrooms" too.
What's the reason?
@@buckhorncortez The reason is most people need to ask the reason.
@@ZilogBob I suppose you mean like kept in the dark and fed on shite
@@johncliff5417 100% correct! :)
Just for your information: The Docu is from 1990.
The 1st sustained nuclear fission reaction was conducted by Enrico Fermi at University of Chicago. They used cadmium control rods...