Since the invention of nuclear weapons, there have been numerous nuclear accidents around the world. One particularly severe such accident was the Windscale fire. The Windscale fire is considered to have been the greatest nuclear accident in the history of the United Kingdom. It was rated a Level Five on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Quick action prevented most of the serious complications that could potentially have arisen from taking place, but it still may have led to upward of 200 cancer cases.
The accident occurred at a nuclear reactor facility located in Cumbria, England. This nuclear reactor facility had two nuclear reactors that were gas-cooled. The reactors were classified as Breeders, and there purpose was to create a wealth of plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. This was done by inundating uranium-238 with neutrons. When one of these uranium-238 atoms absorbed a neutron, it would become uranium-239. Uranium-239 is a very unstable element, and it decays very quickly by beta emission into neptunium-239. Neptunium-239 is also a beta-emitter, and it has a very short half-life of only 2.355 days. When Neptunium decays it becomes the aforementioned plutonium (plutonium-239, to be exact).
In Cumbria, these reactions were taking place inside of huge nuclear reactors consisting of layers of graphite made into bricks. A cooling system was in place based on fans and using air to cool the reactor before going out of a chimney. John Cockcroft, a notable physicists, insisted that filters be placed at the apex of each of the chimneys. Because this was highly expensive and seen as superfluous, the filters were referred to as “Cockfort’s Folly”.
Two years after the Windscale Plant was built, the scientists wor...
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...e that something had gone awry when some of their temperature monitors showed that the temperature in the core was increasing instead of decreasing. The operators had difficulties examining the pile because of faulty monitoring equipment. Eventually Tom Hughes, the deputy manager, went to look at the reactor wearing heavy protective clothing. He saw that the fuel was burning a brilliant red. By this point, the reactor had already been afire for almost forty-eight hours. The situation was named an emergency.
The operators were unsure of how to deal with this unprecedented catastrophe. They tried to put out the fire using cooling fans, by extracting the fuel cartridges, and then using tons of liquid carbon dioxide, but none of these methods worked. Conversely, the cooling fans and carbon dioxide methods actually provided the fire with extra oxygen to use as fuel.
Mary Domsky-Abrams; one of the few to get out of the building, in the beginning of the fire, she recalls talking to one of the managers named: Bonstein. “ As he came near us on that fateful day, one girl asked him, “Mr. Bonstein, why theres is not water buckets?. In case of fire, there would be nothing with which to fight it.” He became enraged at our group of price committee members, and with inhuman anger replied” If you’ll burn, there’ll be something to put out the fire.”
The engineers in Visit Sunny Chernobyl created a new frontier past the safety zone because they want to test the limits of the reactor. What the scientists didn’t account for is that fact that the reactors already had the potential of a dangerous chain reaction. (Blackwell 6) Consequently, their boundary destroying led to catastrophic consequences and the total annihilation of a land area because of massive radiation. Blackwell thought Chernobyl was so horrific he expressed that no one should visit without a “working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured” (Blackwell 7). These are some horrific consequences that followed from surpassing the
In Richard Wunderli’s Book Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen, Wunderli presents idea of “Enchanted Time.” The idea of “Enchanted Time” centers on Holy Days such as Advent, Carnival, Lent, Easter, and Walpurgisnacht where men and women could worship and celebrate their religion, as well as, feel closer to God, the angels, and the saints who resided in the “powerful realm.” Hand Behem and all other Europeans believed in this separation of realms, and in Peasant Fires Behem and the other peasants used these enchanted times to “make an appeal to supernatural forces to find justice for their discontent and meaning for their misery.” (Wunderli) Through the dissection and summation of Lent and Walpurgisnacht the concept of “Enchanted Time”
Published in 1975 by Harper Perennial, The Fires of Jubilee by Stephan Oates explores the personality of Nat Turner and the events which lead up to his leadership of the Virginian slave revolt of 1831 (Oates 4, 126). Young Nat was born into slavery in 1800, but, due to his precocity, he was early lead to believe in the probability, nee inevitability, of his eventual freedom (11-16). However, things were not to be so simple for him. Disease, death, and the vicissitudes of fortune all converged to cause Nat to remain a slave in the hands of several different owners. Of a highly introspective, superstitious nature, Nat chaffed at and brooded extensively on his circumstances – longing for freedom (24-32). Seeking an outlet for his intelligence
The fire started at approx. 1415 hours and burns slowly for the first few minuets carrying heat and smoke up the unprotected stairwell and into a hole leading t...
When most people drive downtown, they are almost always in a hurry. But, if a person actually stops and looks around, it is easily seen that Fond du Lac contains a lot of history. Every old church and store in this city has a special story connected to it. When a disaster strikes, the story can be lost; only to be found again through old newspapers. These churches meant a great deal to the citizens of Fond du Lac during the time of their existence. Couples were married, babies baptized, and generations of families gathered on Sunday mornings for worship in these churches. In the early days, catastrophic fires threatened these structures, and Fond du Lac did not have a proper fire department handle the disaster. Most often, if something caught on fire, it had to be left to burn. Then the expensive rebuilding could begin.
...r more than a hundred thousand years. (Lindsay, 2002) The Chernobyl Accident in 1986 which has not taken the right safety measurement by the power plants operator caused the nuclear power plant to release radiation. There were more than 30 people found dead in this accident impute to radiation exposure. (WNA, 2012; U.S.NRC, 2011)
In Jeannette Wall’s book The Glass Castle, the narrator and author Jeanette has had various terrifying encounters with chaos and destruction. She was burned cooking hot dogs when she was young, frozen in the winter, and starved when her family was low on money. Each time, she has pulled through and survived. In The Glass Castle, fire is a symbol representing chaos, destruction and fear. Jeanette has fought many battles involving neglect, starvation, and poverty but she has always pulled through these destructive experiences just like when she was a child burned from the hot dogs.
It was only after the “Lord Cullen Report” was finalized that the world would have a better knowledge about the causes that led to the disaster of the Piper Alpha. Although the investigation hit its road bumps with very little physical evidence, eyewitness information and accounts of what led up to the disaster helped to give a clearer picture to investigators. It was through eyewitness accounts that concluded that a cloud of flammable hydrocarbon was released into the air when a relief valve from a pump had been removed for maintenance, and the pump restarted. It was this cloud that eventually would find an ignition source and set off the world’s worst oilfield disaster in history.
Throughout recorded history, fires have been known to cause great loss of life, property, and knowledge. The Great Fire of London was easily one of the worst fires mankind has ever seen causing large scale destruction and terror. Samuel Pepys described the fire as “A most malicious bloody flame, as one entire arch of fire of above a mile long… the churches, houses and all on fire and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made.” (Britain Express 1).
Chernobyl was the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. On April 26th, 1986, one of four nuclear reactors located in the Soviet Union melted down and contaminated a vast area of Eastern Europe. The meltdown, a result of human error, lapsed safety precautions, and lack of a containment vessel, was barely contained by dropping sand and releasing huge amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. The resulting contamination killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. The affects of this accident are still being felt today and will be felt for generations to come.
They were then led to the E/E bay by a mechanic. Upon entering the equipment bay, using a thermal imaging camera, the fire fighter located the fire and used a fire-extinguishing agent “Halotron”. According to their website (www.halotron.com), the agent is a proven clean fire extinguishing agent that rapidly evaporates so it can be safely used on most types of equipment. After several attempts at knocking the flame down, the battery reportedly exploded, causing a minor injury to the back of the neck of the ARFF captain who had entered the bay to relieve a member of his crew. A ventilation fan was placed to help reduce the smoke and the battery was removed from the aircraft. The whole event took about one hour and forty minutes after the initial
Technological and accidental hazards can be occur without warning and can be both hazardous material incidents and failures at nuclear power plant. In some cases, victims that have been exposed to harmful chemicals or radiation show little to no symptoms until several years later. There are an increasing number of new substances and chemicals being manufactured which has increased the likelihood of a hazardous material spill or release. This also increases the risk to the environment and to the health and safety of a community.
...r it is arson, an uncontrolled camp fire, or a cigarette butt it doesn’t take much for humans to spark a disaster. Yet there is as well a few set by good old Mother Nature. On top of the effects on the earth as well as humans, there is only one thing we all can do and that is listen to our old pal Smokey the Bear when he says, “only you can prevent wildfire.”