10 October 1957 Pile no1 on Fire

Cats: All Works

April 2007

(Sorry. I have taken liberties with this image but I thought I would show it to you and see what you think. oli)

The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in Great Britain’s history, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The fire took place in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale facility in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as “piles”, had been built in 1950 as part of the British atomic bomb project.The fire burned for three days and there was a release of radioactive contamination that spread across the UK and Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Windscale: 27 October 2007
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