15 Facts About Windscale fire

The UK government played down the events at the time, and reports on the Windscale fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations.

Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.

Windscale fire established his headquarters in a former Royal Ordnance Factory at Risley in Lancashire on 4 February 1946.

All of these materials were highly flammable, and a number of the Windscale fire staff raised the issue of the inherent dangers of the new fuel loads.

The Windscale fire spread to surrounding fuel channels, and soon the radioactivity in the chimney was rapidly increasing.

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Windscale fire reported a dull red luminescence visible, lighting up the void between the back of the reactor and the rear containment.

Windscale fire returned to the reactor upper containment several times throughout the incident, at the height of which a fierce conflagration was raging from the discharge face and playing on the back of the reinforced concrete containment – concrete whose specifications required that it be kept below a certain temperature to prevent its collapse.

About a dozen Windscale fire hoses were hauled to the charge face of the reactor; their nozzles were cut off and the lines themselves connected to scaffolding poles and fed into fuel channels about 1 metre above the heart of the Windscale fire.

The UK government under Harold Macmillan ordered original reports into the Windscale fire to be heavily censored and information about the incident to be kept largely secret, and it later came to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were released during the Windscale fire.

Presence of the chimney scrubbers at Windscale was credited with maintaining partial containment and thus minimising the radioactive content of the smoke that poured from the chimney during the fire.

Board of Inquiry's report concluded officially that the Windscale fire had been caused by "an error of judgment" by the same people who then risked their lives to contain the blaze.

The grandson of Harold Macmillan, prime minister at the time of the Windscale fire, later suggested that the US Congress might have vetoed plans of Macmillan and US president Dwight Eisenhower for joint nuclear weapons development if they had known that the accident was due to reckless decisions by the UK government and that Macmillan had covered up what really happened.

Release of radiation by the Windscale fire was greatly exceeded by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, but the fire has been described as the worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979.

Accident at Windscale fire was contemporary to the Kyshtym disaster, a far more serious accident, which occurred on 29 September 1957 at the Mayak plant in the Soviet Union, when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion.

Windscale fire was retrospectively graded as level 5, an accident with wider consequences, on the International Nuclear Event Scale.