Stormi Nyx

On the tenth of October, 1957, a reactor core caught fire at Windscale, on the coast of Cumbria in the north of England. It was Britain's worst nuclear accident. It burned for three days.

The pile was graphite, cooled by air. Bombard graphite with neutrons long enough and it stores energy it can't hold. The fix was to heat the core until the graphite relaxed and let it go. They had done it eight times before. The ninth time went wrong, and a single fuel channel caught fire. Nobody knew. They sped up the fans to cool the core, and the fans fed the flames. A foreman arriving for work saw smoke coming out of the chimney. By then it had been burning for almost two days.

They put it out by shutting off every bit of air and letting the fire starve. Reactor manager Tom Tuohy climbed onto the lid himself, more than once, and watched the glow die down.

And above it all, at the top of the chimney, sat the thing everyone had mocked. During construction, the physicist Terence Price had raised a worry about a fuel cartridge splitting open and burning. He said the chimneys needed filters. His concern was dismissed as too difficult, and was not even written into the minutes. John Cockcroft, leading the project, ordered the filters anyway, at great expense and delay. They could not be fitted at the base, so they were built on the ground and winched up to the top. People called them Cockcroft's Folly.

During the fire, those filters trapped about ninety-five percent of the radioactive dust.

Milk from five hundred square kilometers of countryside was destroyed, diluted a thousandfold and dumped in the Irish Sea. Nobody was evacuated. The government censored the report and kept it buried for thirty-one years.

Terence Price, who had asked for the filters, said it plainly afterward: the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident.

The thing they had cursed as a waste was the thing that held.

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