An Essay On The Windscale Fire

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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.

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