So its that time again and yes it’s the turn of the faithful British.
So what hapened – basically the old baby used an old system at the beginning of the nuclear age where they didn’t pay much heed to provide adaquate accurate temperature measuring systems.
So not surprisingly one lovely brisk October morning a techie (not this one) was heating up the reactor however the instrumentation in the control room was so bad everyone actually thought the core was cooling instead of heating up. So to get a boost of temperature they withdrew the control rods which caused a nice can of lithium and magnesium to busrt and ignite the uranium and graphite to around 1300 degree centigrade which shot blue and black flames and smoke up the those beautiful chimmeys and into to our lovely atmosphere.
A great link from the news media centre of Lakestay.co.uk with great pics of the old girl
http://www.lakestay.co.uk/1957.htm
Plus my fav wikipedia has a good bit of information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
If things weren’t bad enough now it turns out that they even lied about how much radiation got out and now estimate it was double the amount they told us 50 years ago. Not to worry I reckon BNFL (British Nuclear Fuel) thought there is no way another Nuclear Plant would make such a bollox of setting fire to the most dangerous substance known to man and releasing it into the atmosphere (Little did they know). Sure weren’t they lucky the wind was blowing Northwest – apart from irradiating themselves they only hit northern European countires and it only got as far as Belarus (only a teaser for what was to follow).
I’m sure the board were saying wasn’t it lucky we didn’t hit the bloody black micks (slag for the Irish) or we would have had to give them the rest of the Island back.
Have a nice read from the BBC News - well done guys – ‘honesty is the best policy’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7030536.stm
Now we should really give poor BNFL a break why they only made £2.3 Billion Sterling (approx €3.3 Billion Euro) for one year to March 2007 and if they had told the truth at the time you never know what would have happened 
See the BNFL website for a few more ‘trusting’ facts and figures
Oh just in case you were wondering the can of lithium and magnesium can was doing in the reactor – it was to make the nuclear components the for the Hydrogen Bomb of all things and wouldn’t regularly be there – I’m sure we believe that !!!!
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0824719.html
Also to make total fools of the world population they decided to rename the whole plant Sellafield so we are all safe now and it never happned 
http://www.sellafieldsites.com/
and that’s all in a day
Tags: 50, birthday, bnfl, bomd, british, fallout, H, hydrogen, joke, mess, nuclear, radioactive, sellafeild, windscale, years
