Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident

by Lorna Arnold

In 1957, one of the two reactors built at Windscale was destroyed by fire, in the world's first major nuclear accident. This book describes the fire and what followed, and considers its causes, effects and political importance. It throws a revealing new light on an important event of fifty years ago and on questions of secrecy and responsibility.

Genres: History, Science

261 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

Lorna Margaret Arnold OBE (née Rainbow) was a British historian who wrote a number of books connected with the British nuclear weapons programs.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the event known a the Windscale Fire of 1957. This event has been covered in various other books, but this slim volume is devoted exclusively to the event. The actual text of the book was just okay. While it covers what you would expect, a good deal of the text seemed to be devoted to the political side of the accident. There was so much detail on various committees, papers and other such things that could have been better used focusing on the accident in some other aspect. Based on the text alone, this probably would have been a 3 star book. The book includes numerous appendices, diagrams, a list of abbreviations and diagrams that really helped bring focus to the text. This would be an excellent resource for someone studying the history of major nuclear accidents, as the Windscale Fire is considered the first.

[Dave Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering that the fire and subsequent release of radioactive waste from the 1957 Windscale facility in Scotland was one of the first - and potentially most dangerous - nuclear accidents in history, it's remarkably difficult to find any written material that's both accurate and readable. This book comes closest, but the author, an OBE, physicist, and historian by training, gets bogged down in the technical details and seems to be just as interested in explaining away any possible culpability of the people working at Windscale as she does in conveying the details of the incident and its consequences.

Cut off from American nuclear research in the late 1940s, England went it alone, having to invent, design, build, and safely operate not just nuclear reactors for power generation, but facilities to produce the required uranium and plutonium needed for weapons research too. Underfunded, the rather motley mix of private, government, and military organizations were perpetually understaffed. When they sought to alleviate a buildup of radioactivity in Windscale Unit 1 [something known as the Wigner effect] their previously successful approach instead heated up the containment space to the point where it melting down the cooling devices. Then it caught fire in a spot so radioactive that it was impossible to reach. This produced radioactive waste, particularly in the form of iodine-131, that was spread across hundreds of square miles, most notably forcing all the local dairy farms to discard their now-radioactive milk.

And yet, almost no one has heard of the Windscale almost-disaster. Why is that? Where's the major Hollywood filmmaker picking up this challenge, or a British documentary team offering us a chance to re-examine the events and discuss how even in the late 1950s we were having to face the alarming dangers and risks of nuclear power and nuclear weapons development programs?

This book is a good read to get some background if you skim the highly - overly - technical portions. After about 2/3 of the book it switches to government reports and those are pretty dang dull, at best. Worth a read, even if you don't finish the final page of the final chapter.

[Simon Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1991, this is a very detailed account of the nuclear accident at the Windscale site which occurred in 1957. I read only the 160-page main text, and didn’t delve into the many appendices of official reports.

While well-explained by Arnold, some of the physics was a little beyond my level of casual interest. However, the broader themes of what went wrong in this incident were fascinating in their familiarity: a service over-stretched as a result of Government pressure to deliver more than the expert workforce could adequately oversee, rapid recruitment of non-expert staff to essentially “make up the numbers”, and a resulting lack of expert oversight of activity whose complexity was routinely under-estimated created the conditions for things to go wrong.

Some official reports of the incident then blamed the pressured staff for the incident, although it was rapid local decision-making (including crucial decisions in the absence of robust scientific evidence about discarding milk) that contributed most to protecting the population after the accident.

There are so many lines in this book which could apply directly to much more recent incidents across the public sector that it is difficult to conclude that the broad lessons were ever truly learned.