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.
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 This is why nuclear site licence condition 22 exists (modification or experiment on existing plant). The nuclear rules are written in elevated cancer risk.
@renbymon I think the Kyle hill one does go through the govt side of things
@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.
@avon_deer @tryst They shaved down the fins at first, but after Grapple 1 failed to meet yield targets (1 megaton) they changed bomb designed and needed 5x more tritium. To do this they redesigned the cartridges to fit more fuel and have smaller cooling fins, and I think also without the standard covers.
@avon_deer @tryst This is the doc Tryst mentioned, I've found it to be the most comprehensive: https://youtu.be/lOgSlFkv71U
@tryst Yeah that's where I remember that from, which is why the absence of that info seemed really puzzling to me as it's been known about for decades and is crucial to understanding the problem at Windscale.
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.