A couple of months after Windscale Pile 1, a plutonium producing military reactor in England, burst into flames, the powers to be needed to decide what to do with the identical Pile 2. Here we find an engineer at the Windscale factory pointing out a problem with restarting the shutdown pile:
In July, 1955, improved health physics surveys at Windscale showed an increasing particulate deposition in the Windscale area. Consultants were called in and this was traced to a large number of old uranium cartridges, some of them broken or punctured, which were lying in the air ducts or lodged on the arms of the scanner gear. Efforts were immediately made to clear out the air ducts at each scheduled shut-down. A particularly large quantity of cartridges (over a ton of uranium) had to be “bulldozed” from Pile 2 air duct in 1955 and 1956 by means of wire hawsers and shovels. This was an operation with which Tuohy was intimately concerned and he can speak to it in detail. The scanner gear was inspected as well as could be from the pile roof inspection holes and some badly damaged cartridges, all of early design, were dislodged. Blind spots will however remain until adequate gear to cover the whole discharge face is available.
Gillams, J. L. 1957. Gillams to Owen, Dec. 5, 1957. AB 9/372. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
Like: we never knew that a full ton of uranium fuel is higgledy-piggledy throughout the squat structure and to try to extract it, we have to stick spades and hawsers (I had to look it up, it’s thick rope) into the deadly radioactive heart of the reactor! This certainly makes a mockery of the supposed precision and logic and modernity of reactors.
And note the presence of Tom Tuohy, the second-in-charge of all of Windscale, wielding spades. In late 1957, he will be back doing much the same, only this time the graphite, the very structure of the reactor, and the uranium will be burning.
