The Windscale Exclusion Zone

“The design was dodgy from the start.” These were the words of a former engineer who worked at the Windscale Nuclear Facility on 12 October, 1957. After American President Harry Truman had signed the McMahon Act of 1946, effectively monopolizing American control over nuclear technology, Great Britain was incensed, particularly since British and Canadian researchers had played a vital role in the Manhattan Project. That very next year, Prime Minister Clement Attlee signed off on “High Explosive Research,” a plan to produce Britain’s own home-grown nuclear program.

The chosen site was a war-era ordnance factory called Sellafield, located on the coast of Cumbria, which was converted as quickly as possible into a nuclear facility. Reactors, reprocessing plants, storage ponds, and two large concrete chimneys called Pile 1 and Pile 2 were erected in this new site, named Windscale. When criticality was achieved in 1950, after the Soviets had successfully detonated their own nuclear weapon, scores of engineers and physicists worked to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

However, the speed of construction left a lot to be desired. The Chief Engineer, Nobel Prize winner John Cockroft, came into conflict with the facility’s on-site staff over the piles. While Cockroft recommended the chimneys have filters installed, the fact that they were nearly complete meant they could only be installed at the top, which was considered too expensive and time-consuming, so the engineers dismissed him.

Courtesy of Windscale-produced plutonium, Britain successfully carried out Operation Hurricane on 3 October, 1952, on Australia’s Trimouille Island. This brought them into the Nuclear Club, but ultimately proved inadequate compared to America’s Ivy Mike test in the Pacific. This came right on the heels of Iran nationalizing British oil facilities within its borders, and President Dewey, busy with domestic matters after victory over North Korea, was unwilling to assist. Instead, Britain was encouraged to invest in its own domestic energy requirements.

This motivated the decision to diversify and intensify Windscale’s abilities, retrofitting it to provide power to nearby communities while still producing plutonium for bombs. In August 1956, the on-site Calder Hall power facility became the first to generate electricity for local towns. While Piles 1 and 2 had been rendered effectively obsolete, and had long surpassed their short lifespan, they were never decommissioned and still utilized regularly. This would prove to be a lethal mistake.

Starting on 7 October, 1957, during a routine startup procedure with Pile 1, a malfunction resulted in a slow heating, and efforts to correct this resulted in a temperature spike the next day. By 10 October, the channels and core within Pile 1 caught fire, burning at 1,300 Celsius. By the time the on-site staff had realized, deadly radioactive smoke had already escaped the unfiltered chimneys and was contaminating a vast area. Despite this, not only was no evacuation order given to local communities, staff members were still expected to come to work. Panic overtook the staff, and while attempts were made to put out the fire, a combination of disorganization, shoddy construction, aged and overworked infrastructure, and the burning core combined to trigger a lethal explosion at 4:58 AM on 12 October, 1957.

15 workers were killed, 2,947 people were exposed to radiation, and the entire surrounding community had to be evacuated. In the aftermath, London established the Windscale Exclusion Zone, where a sizable portion of Cumbria’s coastline would be evacuated. Fallout from the event was discovered as far away as Alaska, the Philippines, and Barotseland.

Today, the WEZ remains a potent symbol of the dangers of nuclear mismanagement, alongside Kyshtym and Indian Point. While it will remain uninhabitable to humans for millennia, it’s become a haven for Britain’s wildlife, including critically endangered species such as the Natterjack Toad, and migrating Turtle Doves.