"What a Bloody Mess we're in" - Britain's [REDACTED] Accident

Pushkin. A nasty flu bug was going around Cumberland, in the northwest of England. Tom Tooey hadn't got it, but his wife and kids had, so he had taken the day off to look after them. At five o'clock in the afternoon, he got a call from work.

Can you come in?

There's a fire. Good God, said Towey. He got in his car and drove the quiet country lanes to his workplace. Cumberland was remote, They're not that remote. There were farms and villages. People lived there. That was a concern because to his workplace was a nuclear reactor. How bad was it exactly for a nuclear reactor to be on fire? Too?

He wasn't sure. Nuclear technology was still very new in nineteen fifty seven. Only just over a decade had passed since the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Schnobyl laid decades in the future as too. He later reflected, mankind had never faced anything like this ever before, So no, Tom Towey wasn't sure exactly how bad it was that the nuclear reactor was on fire, but clearly it wasn't good.

How much radioactivity might leak out if the fire got worse, how much might be leaking out already. The wife of another worker recalls getting a phone call at about the same time as Tooey was called in. Where's the baby, asked the worker in his proud, said the wife. In the garden getting some sun. Bring him inside, said the worker.

Close the doors and the windows. Oh, unlock the hens in the henhouse. Then don't go out. I won't be home tonight too. He arrives at Windscale. It's a collection of stark concrete buildings on the coast with two massive chimneys. It was built in a hurry just a few years ago. Why the hurry? The United States and the Soviet Union both had the nuclear bomb. The British government wanted the bomb too. Besides, uclear energy was new, exciting and full of possibilities, As the UK Atomic Energy Authority was eager to make clear in its promotional films, Windscale is unique.

It is science fiction, intruding on our sober lives and let us up very great produce our plutonium, a pure atomic fuel of both industrial and weapons projects.

Too. He thinks had better see this fire for himself. There's only one way to do that. He climbs eighty feet up a metal staircase to an inspection hole. He lifts the metal cover of the hole and peers down into the reactor. Below him is a raging inferno. A thought flashes across Tom to his mind, what a bloody mess we're in. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Lorna Rainbow started school a year later than she could have. The school was over a mile from the farm her family rented, and they didn't have the time to walk her there and back. You had to work all hours to make ends meet as a tenant farmer in southern England in the early nineteen twenties. When Lorna was five, her parents thought she was probably still

a bit too young to walk the mile to school on her own, but at six, off she went. The walk to school was down a rutted lane, dusty in the summer, muddy in the winter. Traffic wasn't a problem. There might be an occasional horse and cart, but the lane passed only a couple of other houses. The main danger, at least in six year old Lorna's mind, was a big oak tree where rumor had it that a man had once been hanged. Could it be haunted? Every day?

Lorna ran past the tree, her heart thumping, But the rest of the walk was enchanting. Lorna remembers a lovely profusion of wild flowers by the roadside. Birds and birds sold tiny emerald green frogs in the puddles in wet and stormy. Whether I would sing as I splashed through the puddles and my rubber boots in winter every winter the magic of snow. The school had just two rooms, one for little kids one for bigger kids. Up to the age of fourteen, then you'd leave to work on a farm, or as a housemaid, or maybe a shop assistant.

The local town had a Woolworth's. It also had a secondary school, and you could sit an exam to earn a scholarship, but nobody from Lorna's school had ever even tried. Further education wasn't something kids aspired to, especially girls. Lorna remembers a poem her grandmother used to recite, be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever. Lorna's dad was more encouraging be good, sweet maid. He'd tell her of a wink and if you must be clever. On the day of the exam, Lorna was terrified. A vast school hall, endless rows of desks, and a paper that said intelligence test. She'd never seen anything like it. But the test turned out to be a wonderful new game.

At her new school, the girls spoke of loftier ambitions. Maybe they could be a nurse, or a teacher, or a secretary at least for a few years until they got married. Lorna liked English and history, but physics in chemistry were barely on the curriculum. I had no idea. She recalls that in nineteen thirty two, two scientists in Cambridge had split the atom. This fact would be central to my later life. In Cambridge in the nineteen thirties, a young man called Bill Penny was doing original research for his doctorate in quantum physics. Though if you'd met him you might not have guessed it. Penny was burly, one hundred meter runner and on the soccer pitch, a robust, bustling center forward of the old fashioned type. He was

shy and prone to blushing. He talked in a drawl and had a lot sided grin permanently on his face. His wooly sweaters were a bit too baggy. He looked and spoke, said one journalist, as though he was a bit simple. When the Second World War broke out, the government asked Penny to make calculations about blast waves from explosions as German bombs rained down on London. Penny became such an expert that in nineteen forty four he went to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project. At first, his American colleagues didn't know what to make of him.

He gave a talk explaining in gruesome detail the effects of last waves on the human body, all with that amiable grin. They nicknamed him the Smiling Killer. But Penny soon won friends. He was completely without pretense. He had absolutely no side or standoffishness. Someone who hosted him recalls it was like having a teddy bear in the house.

But the teddy bear had a mind like a razor. When the Americans wanted to know how high above Hiroshima and Nagasaki to detonate their bombs, it was Penny they trusted with the calculation. Afterwards, Penny flew to Japan and roamed through the ruined cities, looking for clues that would let him calculate exactly how much power the blasted unleashed.

He worked it out by mapping crumpled gasoline cans. Back in Britain, Penny looked forward to a quiet life in academia. But the government had other ideas. Britain. They told him needed the atom bomb. As it happened, Penny agreed. Had seen up close in Japan the horrors of the bomb, he bought the logic that Britain would be safer with its own nuclear deterrent. But now the war was over, the US had decided no longer to share its nuclear knowledge with its allies. The only person who can build a bomb for Britain, the government told Penny, is you.

Penny agreed reluctantly to lead a team of scientists that rapidly grew from the hundreds to the thousands. One interviewer invited Penny to big himself up. How many people are working under you, Penny replied, in his laconic drawl about her. By nineteen fifty two, Penny was ready for the first test of Britain's new atomic technology in a remote part of Australia. The Prime Minister waited anxiously to hear if the test had failed or succeeded. It said he had two telegrams ready. One began, tough luck, Dr Penny, the other well done, Sir William. A journalist later asked Sir William Penny to describe how the test had gone. It went off, he replied, like a bomb. The British government hoped to use the successful test to persuade America to

agree to a partnership to share nuclear knowledge. But while Britain had been catching up, America had moved ahead from the A bomb to the H bomb. H bombs worked very differently and were much more powerful. Britain would have to build an H bomb too. They'd need plutonium, lots of plutonium, and quickly they'd manufacture it. At Windscale Cautionary tails will be back after the break. What a bloody mess we're in. Tom Tooy closes the inspection hole and descends the eighty feet of metal steps, thinking about his options.

The nuclear reactor at Windscale was cooled by air, not by water. If something's too hot, blowing more air on it is generally a good way to cool it down. But if something's on fire blowing air on it is going to make the fire worse. Could he turn off the fans to try to put the fire out? He could, but it was risky. Only part of the reactor was on fire, the fans were still cooling the rest. Turning off the fans could make the rest overheat, which might make things worse. It was a last resort. Could he dump water on the reactor to try to put the fire out? He could, but it was risky. The reactor core was made from graphite. Picture a kind of honeycomb, and inside each hole a series of metal canisters containing

uranium fuel. What would happen if you dumped a load of water on a burning mass of uranium, metal and graphite. Nobody was sure, as Tom Tooey said, mankind had never faced anything like this, ever, that it might release gas that could cause an explosion. Water was a second from last resort. Workers at Windscale had been trying to create a firebreak by using steel poles to push the uranium canisters out of the honeycomb holes around the part of the core where the fire was burning. Now dripping with sweat in their heavy protective suits, they start trying to shove the burning canisters out of the fiery core itself.

It's hard and canisters are twisted by the heat. The poles come out, glowing red and dripping molten steel. They need more steel poles. They made the scaffolding on a nearby construction site. They were heroes that night, an officer later said of the workers. But were their heroics having an effect? At close to midnight, Tom Tooey climbs the eighty feet of steps again to peer through the inspection hole.

The fire has spread. At Lorna Rainbow's secondary school for girls, nobody had ever gone on to university. Lorna's teachers encouraged her to sit the scholarship exams once again. She aced them. Soon after she finished her English degree, the Second World War broke out. As men signed up to fight, women filled the jobs they vacated. Lorna received a telegram from the War Office inviting her to interview for the post of Junior administrative Assistant. At first, she felt bewilled. There was so much to learn, she recalls, and I was woefully ignorant. I had no office experience and knew nothing about the army. She began by arranging rooms for meetings and being a general gopher. Then her boss asked her

to write up the meeting minutes and then to draft papers and briefing notes. He'd go through them with her, sentence by sentence. What's your basis for saying this? Should you explain that point more fully? Think? Who's your readership? Tell your story in a way your readers will understand. She thanked him for his kindness in mentoring her, and he laughed he wasn't being kind, He'd simply seen how quickly she could learn. Lorna was promoted to work on plans for the occupation of Berlin. When Germany surrendered, she was sent to Berlin. She spent her first night in a ground floor flat with broken windows, listening to Russian soldiers marauled through the streets, singing drunken songs and shooting

in the air. What if they came in through her broken window? The next morning she mentioned her concern to an officer here. He said, have a revolver. Lorna worked on setting up administration of the British Stone of Berlin and was surprised to find that she was senior to some of the army clerks. Yes, sir, let's say to her, Miss Rainbow, Sir. But the British were strapped for resources.

Their needs support from America. Lorna was sent to Washington to help with the negotiation. At a lunch to celebrate the deal, the Secretary of State began his speech with a smile in Lorna's direction. Lady and gentlemen. Lorna spent three years in Washington, profiled in the newspapers as a vital cog in the diplomatic wheel. Then she resigned. Why it seemed perfectly natural, She later explained, the world was changing from a wartime to a post war situation. Women who had filled the gaps during the war were generally being displaced. It never occurred to me to think that I had established any rights to a special position in this man's world. With hindsight, she says, she could have continued her career, but at the time, I simply felt

that I'd done my bit. Lorna moved back to England and got a low level office job, and her husband wasn't that what women were supposed to do? Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever? At one o'clock in the morning, the phone rings at the home of the Chief Constable of Cumberland. A few years earlier, he'd met bosses at Windscale to agree on procedures in case of a major emergency, which was he was assured only a remote possibility. Could he dust off that file and start to implement the procedures? The Chief Constable makes calls through the night. A fleet of buses descends on Cumberland, ready to evacuate villages downwind of the reactor. At Windscale.

Tom Toohey searches desperately for an alternative to water as a way to quench the fire. A huge amount of some inert gas like argone might do it. But where is he going to get a huge amount of argone in rural England. In the middle of the night, he tracks down a tanker of carbon dioxide. It's worth a try.

At four in the morning, he pumps in the carbon dioxide, then climbs the eighty feet of steps again to peer through the inspection hole. The fire still burns. They'll have to risk the water. Two. He lines up the hoses with the honeycomb holes and turns on the taps. Sir William Penny had got a knighthood in nineteen fifty two for building Briton's for A bomb, But the reward he really wanted was a quiet life in academia, not a chance, said the government. You need to build us an H bomb.

Penny dutifully got to work, despite giving everyone the general impression that he would much rather be digging his garden. The task became urgent. America and Russia were discussing an international treaty to ban nuclear tests. Penny would have to test his H bomb before that ban came in. He knew he wasn't ready, and he thought the test might fail.

It did, but it brought a backup plan, a massive A bomb that might make a big enough blast to fool a lay person into thinking it was an H bomb. Those who knew the secret called the massive A bomb the Penny Dreadful. It went off impressively. Assembled journalists duly reported that Penny's H bomb test had been a great success.

Penny said nothing. In nineteen fifty seven, the US President finally agreed to the British Prime Minister's request for a nuclear information sharing partnership, but Congress still had to approve the deal. The Prime minister could only hope that nothing would happen in the meantime that might call into question Britain's competence as a nuclear power. Then news reached the Prime Minister from Cumberland. The reactor at Windscale was on fire and nobody knew how bad it might be. Water gushes through the hoses onto the burning reactor core. Tom Tooey waits anxiously, an explosion might kill him, but there's no explosion. Once again, he climbs the eighty feet of steps to peer through the inspection hole. The water isn't working,

the fire is still raging. It's time for the last resort two. He shuts off the fans, the fire dies out, the rest of the reactor doesn't overheat. At midday, the Chief Constable of Cumberland gets another phone call, panic over no need to evacuate any villages. Tom Tooey drives back home to his sick wife and children and collapses into bed. Exhausted.

But why had the fire happened? They were bound to be awkward questions from the Americans. They needed answers, and quickly the government set up an inquiry and asks their go to nuclear experts to share it. Sir William Penny lorna rainbow took her husband's name. Now she was Lorna Arnold, but her husband turned out to be secretly struggling with his sexuality. He came out as gay and left her, not daring to tell her to her face. By the time she received his letter of farewell, he had left the country and she was left alone with two young children and a low level office job. One lunchtime in nineteen fifty eight, Lorna sat at the desk in her office in London with a cheese sandwich brought from home

and a cup of instant coffee, trying to summon up the enthusiasm to embark on a fresh pile of tedious papers. They were sunny outside. She decided to go for a walk and cheer herself up with a proper coffee from one of the new Italian places that were opening in London. There she bumped into a man she hadn't seen for years.

They'd been in Berlin together. How's your life turned out, the man asked, I'm forty two years old, said Lorna. I'm bringing up two sons on my own. My job doesn't pay much and it bores me senseless. The man was shocked. How had that happened. He had seen in the war how brilliant Lorna was. Everyone had except Larna herself.

Leave it with me, he said. Lorna got a letter inviting her to an interview with the UK Atomic Energy Authority. We're expanding our staff, the director explained, because we're studying the aftermath of an incident at Windscale. Lorna said, I know nothing about science. I can't possibly be of any use to you. She got the job. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Just six days had passed since the fire when so William Penny arrived at Windscale.

He called in the workers, still drained from their sleepless night. One recalls feeling intimidated at first Penny was a big man, but he soon found that Penny was also extremely pleasant, courteous, thoughtful, very polite. Indeed, the story Penny heard began five years earlier. Soon after Windscale opened, workers had noticed a sudden increase in temperature in part of the reactor core. Nobody understood it.

Nuclear technology was still very new. It turned out to be something called Vigner energy. The reactor core, remember, was a graphite honeycomb in which were placed cartridges of uranium as radioactive particles from the urania and buffeted that graphite honeycomb. They knocked atoms in the graphite out of place. This caused a build up of Vigner energy, which could randomly release itself in a burst of heat. This was a problem.

You don't want bits of your reactor randomly overheating. To prevent that, they'd have to release the Vigner energy in a controlled way. Every few months, the windscale workers performed a Vigner release. They let the reactor core heat up, not too much, just enough for the graphite atoms to safely rearrange themselves. They'd done this Vigner release eight times.

It worked kind of but not in the same way. Every time, as they let the core heat up, it would heat unevenly. They'd have to decid keep heating to get the cooler parts of the core to the required temperature, or stop heating to prevent the hotter parts from getting too hot. There was no operating manual. The workers just had to figure it out as best they could. On the ninth Vigna release, it seemed they'd applied too much heat and the core caught fire. But what really caused the fire was that nobody at Windscale really understood what they were doing. Why did each vignim release happen differently?

They didn't know, and they were working with only partial information. There weren't enough instruments in the core to check temperatures everywhere. They were also understaffed. In the hurry to build the bomb, the British nuclear program had expanded too before enough workers could be properly trained. After ten days in Windscale, Penny wrote up his findings. These explained the underlying problems. He didn't blame the workers for the fire, and he praised how they had fought it. They were prompt and efficient, he said, and displayed considerable devotion to duty. Penny's report landed on the Prime Minister's desk. The Prime Minister was horrified it made the British nuclear program look amateurish. If

members of the US Congress saw this, they might refuse to approve Britain as a nuclear partner. Penny's report couldn't be published. The Prime Minister ordered that the report be locked away in a filing cabinet and issued his own summary instead. His summary blamed the workers. They'd made an error of judgment, he said, sorry, won't happen again. Congress approved the NUCTAR partnership. Britain's scientists now had access to US expertise. A few months later, the US delegation visited Windscale.

They were shown round by high powered bosses who hadn't been at Windscale during the fire, and told a story that bore no relation to what actually happened. Tom Tooey had to sit and listen, and they didn't let him say a word. What did you think of that? An interviewer later asked tooe How polite do you want me to be too? He replied, I thought, what a shower of bus. Under British law, secret government papers are usually published after thirty years have passed. Thirty years after Windscale in nineteen eighty seven, the time approached for the Penny Report to be taken out of its filing cabinet and made available to the public. That prospect worried the Records officer of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. The problem was

that the Penny Report on its own wouldn't tell the full story of what had happened at Windscale. After writing his report, Penny had recommended further investigations into the issues he'd identified. Documents from those investigations were due to be released later in dribs and drabs, thirty years after each was filed away. Why don'ly release them all at once, said the records officer, And I'll write a book to accompany them. It's an important story, she said. It deserves to be told in a way that readers will understand.

Good idea, said her bosses. When her book was published, the records officer got letters from workers who've been there at the time of the fire for thirty years. They said, we've been blamed for an error of judgment. Thank you for making it clear that it wasn't our fault. The records officer's name was Lorna Arnold. Lorna was now in her early seventies. She should have retired, but she had found a job she loved. Lorna was assisting a historian to produce an epic three volume history of Britain's post war nuclear work. When the historian retired, with the third volume not yet finished, Lorna took it upon herself to finish the job. They could not bear, said Lorna, to see the waste of years of arduous research in archives

to which no other historians had or might ever have access. When Lorna was at school, her science teacher hadn't even mentioned the splitting of the atom. Now she was writing nuclear history with the help of a new friend, Bill Penny, now retired and finally enjoying the quiet life. Lorna spent hours at Penny's home, going over her research together and getting an education in how little government ministers sometimes understand about technology. Lorna Penny would say, where did you get this garbage? A ministerial memo? She explained, Penny drawled Fellow didn't know what he was talking about. When Lorna was eighty one, a new boss at the Atomic Energy Authority insisted that she had to retire, but others knew how

brilliant she still was and found a budget for a typist to help her finish the book at home. It was published in two thousand and one. Lorna was eighty six years old. Remember the windscale worker who called his wife, bring the baby inside, shut the doors and windows. He was right to be cautious. The windscale fire turned out to have been much more serious than anyone realized at the time. Experts now believe that perhaps a hundred locals may have died earlier than they otherwise would have from cancers caused by radiation that leaked from the burning reactor.

Nobody had defined in advance what level of radiation leakage might be tolerable for the local population that had to work it out on the fly as the fire raged. The calculations seemed reasonable with the knowledge they had at the time, but that knowledge was incomplete. Nuclear technology was still very new. Typically, on cautionary tales, we like to draw lessons from disasters, and if you want a lesson from Windscale, it's this. When someone's in a hurry roll out a dangerous technology, don't be too quick to assume that they know what they're doing. And when they assure you that they do, don't be too quick to believe them.

But I also want to take a step back, because to tell these stories of disasters we rely on others. People like Bill Penny, who asked thoughtful questions of the windscale workers straight after the fire and wrote a fair and insightful report. People like Lorna Arnold, who thirty years later wrote a book to put that report in context.

In two thousand and seven, the fiftieth anniversary of the Windscale Fire, the BBC made a documentary. Now in her nineties, Lorna agreed to take part. She was still as committed as ever telling a story that gave credit where it was due.

Tom Tooey was the most impressive character. He was pretty young for his senior post. He was a lively, handsome man, sort of bold features at the mass of gorgeous auburn hair flowing back from his forehead.

Tom Tooey was brave and decisive and fighting the fire. He's a hero, no doubt of the Windscale story. But I also want to celebrate Lorna Arnold, because sometimes the storyteller can be a hero too. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Billy. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise bend A d Afhaffrey edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohene, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. You can support Cautionary Tales

by joining My Cautionary Club at Patreon dot com slash Cautionary Club for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening, and other exciting perks. Alternatively, you can join Pushkin Plus on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our show and others across the Pushkin network.

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"What a Bloody Mess we're in" - Britain's [REDACTED] Accident

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