Watched a YT vid last night about the Windscale fire.
20 mins long, and though it was well produced and enjoyable to watch something was conspicuous by its absence; the changes that UK gov forced the plant to adopt, despite protests from technical staff, which made the reactor run well outside design spec.
That might not seem like much but the vid presents Windscale as an accident due to a "fatal design flaw" and not gov pressure.
It's such a vital piece of information, that the fuel cartridges were redesigned to run hotter inside the core to increase production, were way out of spec. The plant manager resigned over the changes.
The video doesn't mention this at all.
I skim-watched a couple more videos and none of them mention this?? Like it's not a footnote; this has been known as one of the main contributors to the fire for decades and yet these videos just completely ignore them like it doesn't matter.
@renbymon BBC's "Windscale: Britain's Biggest Nuclear Disaster" goes into significant detail about the pressure to produce plutonium and tritium, the resulting modifications to the isotope cartridges, their potential role in the fire (combined with Winger release), and the government's efforts to blame the fire on the operators in order to save face during the 1958 MDA negotiations.
