Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Oct 10, 1957: workers at the Windscale Piles in Cumberland on England’s NW coast, where two air-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors were producing plutonium for the United Kingdom’s nuclear stockpile, discovered Pile No. 1 was on fire. This was the UK’s worst nuclear accident.



Ironically, the accident occurred during an improvised, periodic process known as annealing, in which to prevent a reactor fire the entire reactor was heated to release excess energy (Wigner energy, after physicist Eugene Wigner) created when graphite is bombarded with neutrons. That morning, after two Wigner releases, operators noticed that contrary to expectations the reactor core’s temperature was rising, not falling, with one thermocouple indicating a temperature of 750°F. Cooling fans were switched to high, literally fanning the flames.

A foreman arriving for his shift spotted smoke coming from the reactor chimney. This, combined with rising temperature readings, led operators to suspect the core was on fire. A direct inspection of several fuel channels revealed the uranium fuel inside was glowing red hot. At that point, the fire had been burning for nearly two days. Efforts to blow it out with the cooling fans only increased its intensity and attempts to manually eject the fuel into the cooling pond were unsuccessful. Pumping in liquid carbon dioxide to extinguish it also failed.

By the next day, 11 tons of uranium (6% of the core) were burning, temperatures rose up to 2,400° F, and the structural integrity of the reactor itself was at grave risk. With no other alternatives, about a dozen fire hoses were directly connected to the fuel channels above the fire. Pumping water onto burning uranium was dangerous because the uranium would oxidize, releasing hydrogen from the water molecules which could mix with the air inside the reactor and trigger a catastrophic explosion. Fortunately, this did not happen. But the fire continued to burn & burn.

Out of options, Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy ordered everyone except himself and the fire chief to evacuate the building. They shut off the cooling fans and other sources of ventilation to starve the fire of oxygen. Tuohy watched from atop the reactor as the flames died down.

The water was left on for another day until the fire was completely out. The Windscale reactors never operated again. Decontamination and decommissioning efforts began in the 1980s but aren’t scheduled to be completed until 2120 at an estimated cost of at least £70,000,000,000.

Chimney filters captured alot, but not all of the radioactivity released by the fire. There are no precise measurements, nobody knows, but an estimated 20,000 curies of iodine-131, 12,000 curies of xenon-133, 594 curies of cesium-137, and a small but significant amount of polonium-210 escaped.

This was kept secret for years by the UK gov’t. On the International Nuclear Event Scale adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1990. The 1957 Windscale fire ranks at 5 out of possible severity level of 7 (Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 are both classified as Level 7 accidents).



Because of the localized heavy (but still unreported) levels of iodine-131 deposits on grass, the government ordered all milk produced within nearly 200 square miles of Windscale for almost a month to be collected, diluted, and dumped into the Irish Sea.

Atomic Milk (1957)


Tom Tuohy was 39 when he oversaw the successful extinguishing of the fire in Windscale Pile No. 1. He served as general manager there from 1958-64, and died in Australia on March 12, 2008, at age 90.


In 1981, operator BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) renamed the site Sellafield in a public relations ploy. The whole site is now owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

The official inquiry into the Windscale accident, submitted to the UK Atomic Energy Authority on October 26, 1957, by Director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment William Penny, but not made public until January 1988.

Report on the accident at Windscale No. 1 Pile on 10 October 1957 (PDF)

2007 BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_pWgRx7lno

Another BBC docu 47 min episode from "Inside Story" that aired April 18, from 1990: Our Reactor Is On Fire




Oct 10, 1915: HMS E-19's boarding party sank four German ships and damaged another without the sub having to fire a torpedo during the "Submarine Massacre of 1915". One ship tried to bribe the boarding party with beer. The submariners took the beer but then sank the ship. That German beer, good stuff!


E19 was scuttled by her crew on April 8, 1918 outside Helsinki in Gulf of Finland, along with E1, E8, E9, C26, C27, and C35 to avoid seizure by advancing German forces who had landed nearby.

A beer, Slottskällans Vrak, has been brewed using yeast recovered from beer bottles found on the wreck of SS Nicomedia, a ship sunk by E19 off Öland.

Vrak (Wreck) - direct from SS Nicomedia

On October 11, 1915, the British submarine HMS E19 sank the German cargo ship SS Nicomedia off the southern tip of Öland. In the summer of 1999, some of the crew's beer was salvaged by a group of divers who contacted us. In the bottles there was beer with a fascinating taste and not least some live yeast. A panel of experienced beer tasters was set to investigate what was in the bottles and concluded that it was a wheat beer that had been aged with pleasure. The storage conditions were close to optimal, dark and cold as it is at the bottom of the sea. The yeast found has been cultivated and has been the basis for the development of Vrak. This means that Slottskällans Bryggeri not only produces Sweden's only wheat beer, but we now produce two different ones.

Contents: Three types of malt: Wheat, pilsner and light caramel malt.
Two types of hops: Nordbrauer and Steiermark.
Yeast: "1915"
Technical data: Stem wort strength: 13.8°Plato, Original Gravity 1.056
Apparent extract content in the beer: 3.3°Plato, Final Gravity 1.013
Alcohol content: 5.4% (volume), 4.4% (weight).

Oct 9, 1948: Winston Churchill warned that the world seems remorselessly approaching a third war and pleaded that the US not destroy its atomic bomb stockpile lest all Europe be subjected to "Communist tyranny".




Too soon? The HIROSHIMA reenactment incident...

Oct 10, 1976: Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets participated in a widely condemned "reenactment" of the Hiroshima bombing - complete with a simulated atomic explosion for a paying crowd of 40,000 people in Harlingen, TX.




FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE premiered in London 60 years ago today.




VP Spiro Agnew cops a plea and resigns to avoid trial and potential imprisonment 50 years ago today:


As the scandal unfolded, Agnew resigned from the vice presidency on October 10, 1973. He later pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion, which allowed him to avoid prison time. Instead, Agnew was sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation and fined $10,000.

Agnew's resignation and plea were part of a negotiated settlement to the charges against him. His resignation marked the first time in U.S. history that a vice president had resigned due to criminal charges.