Very off usual topic but it’s a special interest so deal with it, I was walking on the coniston high fells a few days ago and got this photo, if you know your nuclear history the name of this place should be familiar, sellafield originally Windscale, this location was home to the UK’s worst nuclear disaster and the first major nuclear accident at a designated plant, the Windscale plant was an air cooled graphite moderated reactor in the 1950s-1960s it was used by the MOD for the refinement of British plutonium for nuclear weapons and due to multiple design flaws the uranium fuel cells could be dropped onto concrete and ignite and that’s what happened it would have been the 3rd worst nuclear disaster ever with the entire Lake District in a exclusion zone but it wasn’t due to my one of my favourite engineers, John Cockcroft and his role in the design, he was one of the engineers on the project and in the middle of the construction he requested that filters be placed on the chimney and at a high cost but it was that difference that was the reason why the lakes district is now not inhabitable. There is many more other sources of information on this elsewhere online and if you really want to see the shitshow of British nuclear programs there is some other devices that should be looked at including the violet club nuclear warhead, the largest fission weapon ever made, regulated by 100,000 steel ball bearings.
