It would have been a lot worse without "Cockcroft's Folly" - massive filters built on top of the "chimneys" that caught radioactive crud coming up the stack.
These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires!
He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
There is a somewhat similar technology for LWRs: systems that filter soluble fission products (including iodine in second generation systems) from steam so the steam can be vented from the containment structure in an accident. These would have been very useful at Fukushima.
The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
Indeed, people should always bear in mind Windscale was a nuclear weapons facility hidden inside a power plant than a genuine attempt at a power station.
As some of the other comments have noted, Windscale (now Sellafield) was part of the British nuclear weapons programme. That covered everything in secrecy which was bad for public trust. And this has always been difficult to extricate from uranium-based processes. It's where the "peace" in "Greenpeace" comes from; a lot of historical opposition to nuclear reactors was driven by the knowledge that the resulting plutonium would be used to make even more bombs.
Apropos of the theme, I have a family member who does height work. Every year (typically in the months where weather will allow), he gets contracted to do some disassembly of buildings at Sellafield (Windscale as was). What follows is hearsay, but still fun :)
The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly.
The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
After reading The Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, which chronicles all major nuclear incidents (up to the 1990's I think) I had two key takeaways. There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected, and Britain does not have the right cultural mindset for dealing with nuclear safety. Apologies if that offends anyone.
Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a good cultural mindset for nuclear safety?
Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
I'm very hopeful that within a hundred years this madness will stop and nuclear power will be common place. It's evolved and come along way since Chernobyl... Small modular reactor's and molten salt reactors can pump out more than enough clean energy and without the fear mongering and waste side effects. Apologies to British Petroleum
> There are far more missing nuclear submarines than I would have ever expected
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
Something like windscale would never be built again either. It was an air cooled research reactor designed to make weapon fuel, not power generation or anything useful for civilian purposes. As they learned, air cooling at that scale was a terrible idea and never used again.
a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously.
b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
> 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles, kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
> I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not fossil fuel then!
The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident. In the spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government. 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.
A good video! Just to attempt a potentially frivolous answer to your question, the "race" in her video is about economic factors and this is often not particularly interesting to engineering minded folks, whereas nuclear power has all sorts of fun challenges, options, and processes going on. It's more interesting, perhaps, even if it's not the best option in a pragmatic sense.
There is a pervasive narrative in certain groups that renewables fundamentally cannot do "the job" of providing power for all of humanity. They cherry pick issues from current small scale deployments, ignore all the times and places it works just fine, and claim that only nuclear can handle our needs without reducing our way of life.
This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|2 years ago|reply
These reactors weren't build for nuclear power or anything, they were built to create the right kind of nuclear materials for weapons. They were essentially a couple of bloody great big nuclear bonfires!
He also along with Ernest Walton developed the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier, which is a clever arrangement of capacitors and diodes that produce a very high voltage from an AC source. Initially these were used in "atom smashing" cyclotrons, but came to be used in every CRT television you've ever seen.
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1224/ML12248A021.pdf
The Cockcroft-Walton scheme was not for cyclotrons, but rather for a simple linear potential drop accelerator. Cyclotrons build up the energy of particles over many iterations, so they don't need that high a voltage.
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Follies avoided nuclear disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558045 - Nov 2014 (15 comments)
[+] [-] Mindwipe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|2 years ago|reply
The worst case of this was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Opera , a foreshadow of the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for attacking Iraq.
[+] [-] EliRivers|2 years ago|reply
The typical way to raze building involves just knocking them down; these are actual disassemblies. They'll go up and unbolt and slice off pieces, and carefully lower them, where they'll be examined and tagged and bagged for onwards disposal. It's a really expensive way to remove a building. There are sections of the site where he's been told "do NOT stop walking in front of THIS building". There are rooms (and maybe entire buildings) for which the records of what radioactive fun went on in them have been lost. There are dangerously radioactive (provenance unknown) things effectively dumped in ponds that have to be removed carefully, a piece at a time, possibly involving underwater disassembly. Possibly including a car that sucked up a big dose of something it shouldn't and needed to be made relatively safer, quickly.
The only saving grace is that when you have to disassemble things so slowly, the handful of people hired to do it can literally only be paid so much per day. It's going to cost orders of magnitude more than just knocking a building down, but spread over decades and decades.
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InCityDreams|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbyers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cduzz|2 years ago|reply
It's an amazing story.
I wonder how much of the workplace health and safety processes from the blitz were still somewhat in force here. For instance there was a mid-blitz technique of soaking unexploded bombs in liquid oxygen to cool and pause a battery in the anti-tamper device that otherwise made the bomb impossible to defuse. But golly, that's an unhealthy sentence to type in a 2020s not-at-war part of the world.
[+] [-] itronitron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badcppdev|2 years ago|reply
Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.
[+] [-] pookha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] George83728|2 years ago|reply
Of all nuclear accidents, these are easily the least concerning. For one, only two western nuclear submarines have ever been lost and those were well publicized, nobody should be surprised by those. The Soviets/Russians lost quite a few, which I don't think many people would find surprising, but it's really not a big deal anyway from an environmental perspective. Sea water is excellent shielding, the wrecks are now used as habitats for all kinds of sea life which is unfazed by the radiation. As for heavy metal pollution, ocean water already has several billion tons of uranium and other heavy metals dissolved in it, naturally. A few more tons from a few reactor cores is nothing.
Quite frankly, we should view deliberately dropping old nuclear reactors into the ocean as a practical and economical method of disposal. In fact, the Soviets and the UK have deliberately done this several times and (the US and Switzerland did too, to a much lesser extent.) There is no evidence that any of this has caused any harm to the environment.
[+] [-] FredPret|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azubinski|2 years ago|reply
Tragedies are tragedies, and only scoundrels compete on the scale of tragedies.
But in fairness, this accident was small compared to Chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
[+] [-] Neil44|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] equalsione|2 years ago|reply
https://www.ichec.ie/news/revisiting-1957-windscale-nuclear-...
[+] [-] epmatsw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _aaed|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndsipa_pomu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acidburnNSA|2 years ago|reply
I would like to just remind everyone of safety context, where the WHO is currently estimating 7 million premature deaths per year from particulate emissions from fossil and biofuel combustion energy sources.
Despite several high-profile and memorable nuclear accidents, nuclear fission remains among the safest and cleanest ways we know to make electricity. Plus it's low-carbon to boot.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
[+] [-] qbasic_forever|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mindwipe|2 years ago|reply
a) the British state has a very, very long track record of lying about domestic nuclear, so the public finds any safety claims hard to take seriously.
b) the main issue with nuclear power in the UK is economic - the public have had to take on genuinely enormous liabilities in pensions and cleanup liabilities from every previous attempt, so do not take the cost projections for future sites at face value. And quite rationally so. But if we assume that liability overruns from the taxpayer were to happen at the same rate, the economic case for nuclear versus renewables on a small, windy, rainy island with a lot of tides disappears.
[+] [-] bazoom42|2 years ago|reply
Does this include emissions from stuff like motor vehicles, kitchen stoves etc? Or just emissions from power plants which could reasonably be replaced with nuclear?
[+] [-] Gwypaas|2 years ago|reply
Great that the alternative in 2023 are renewables and not fossil fuel then!
[+] [-] ndsipa_pomu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoneWithAllThat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnCClarke|2 years ago|reply
Given that it's just a technology choice, and that there are much cheaper [1], faster, options available I wonder why?
--- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quI_8xYSWYE
[+] [-] petercooper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrguyorama|2 years ago|reply
This is done at least by some in order to attempt to get funding redirected away from solar and wind and storage projects and research into the money pit of nuclear power plants and research. They do this because they actually care about having to rely on fossil fuels for as long as possible.
This is why a lot of conservatives in Texas believe their winter storm horrors were caused by wind turbines, which they often call "windmills" for some reason, even though if you call a magazine "a clip" they will rip your head off and complain that you shouldn't be allowed to make policy about something you don't understand.