Today is the official end of the government's nuclear "consultation" (more on that coming soon). It's also the 50th anniversary of the world's second biggest nuclear disaster - at Windscale, now known as Sellafield, in West Cumbria.
Jean McSorley, a nuclear consultant, has written about the disaster in today's Guardian. It's powerful stuff, so I'm posting an extract here:
"I opened the gag-port and there it was - a fire at the face of the reactor. I thought: 'Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.'" Those were the words of the late Arthur Wilson, the instrument technician who discovered the Windscale fire on October 10 1957, in No 1 of the twin plutonium piles. It signalled the beginning of the world's second biggest nuclear reactor accident.
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Testimony from those who fought the fire provides an insight into the personal risks taken - and the gamble that was taken - to put out the fire. Tom Touhy, deputy manager of the Windscale works (now known as Sellafield), supervised the battle with the blaze. He described an attempt by workers to isolate the graphite and fuel that was on fire. This entailed opening ports at the front of the reactor and using steel rods to try to push the fuel out of the back of the pile itself into a separate holding area. The attempt failed. The rods dripped molten uranium on to the floor on which the men were standing.
They then faced the dilemma of whether to cut off the air, cutting ventilation and perhaps also risking the reactor heating up even more, or starving the fire of oxygen. Cutting off the air and carbon dioxide was dismissed as too risky, so only one option was left: water. "If you mix steam and graphite you make a gas that is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can explode violently, so it is not a very nice mix," Touhy said later.
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What wasn't widely known at the time was that radioactive contamination from the fire had also been monitored as far away as south-east England and even on mainland Europe. Nor was it known that a canister of the now notorious polonium-210, used in nuclear weapons, had also burned in the fire.
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What the secrecy and reassurances about the health effects could not do was to remove the growing doubts about the risks of nuclear technology - the military and civil links, and the political cover-ups that take precedence over the public's right to know. That first nuclear alarm that sounded in the public consciousness still resonates today.
