20-04-2019, 03:55 PM
8
Re: In search of Scottie
I wonder how many people know that the Jodrell Bank installation was presented as being a research tool when most of its use was to track any ICBM's launched by the USSR.Like Windscale, later name change to Sellafield, far from being intended to produce really cheap electricity was intended to produce plutonium for the British Bomb and only much later to process spent nuclear fuel.
Then the scarcely mentioned Dounreay plant. That thing included a fast breeder reactor. Back in the day there was a standing gallows humour joke that the only safe fast breeder was a rabbit. That's why it was built beyond civilisation and where the prevailing winds would blow it away from the UK.
Back to Windscale, anyone remember the "small chimney fire" that took place?
Small chimney fire? In a pigs eye!
The only reason that it wasn't a proto Chernobyl was that it was basically a gas cooled pile that went critical. With a gas cooled beast when an exception takes place unlike a liquid cooled thing when immediate panic is the order of the day putting the kettle on and having a nice cup of tea while thinking about the best course of action.
But Windscale was a real clustermuck. It was caused by a big time error prior to cooking the graphite moderator in order to release the Wigner energy --- I'm probably past being boring but the bottom line is that more than a little that has been fed to The Great Unwashed has been just platitudes.
Like the Windscale disaster.
Small chimney fire indeed!
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