On This Day: Britain's worst nuclear accident

OCTOBER 10, 1957: Britain’s worst nuclear accident took place on this day in 1957 after a reactor caught fire at the Windscale plutonium plant that was providing fuel for atom bombs.

The blaze at the site in Cumbria raged for three days, spread radiation across northern Europe and caused at least 100 known deaths from cancer.

In the aftermath of the West’s first nuclear disaster, a British Pathé newsreel shows milk being poured down the drain.

Dairy produce from cows living in 200 square miles of farmland surrounding the plant, which was later called Sellafield, was banned for three weeks.

The newsreel, which played down the radiation danger after the Government tried to minimise public fear of the new power, also filmed reactor technicians, Stan Ritson.

He was banned from kissing his wife for four days after helping to put out the fire in which 11tons of uranium burned at a temperature of 1,300C.

An official inquiry by British atom bomb pioneer Sir William Penney found there was “no immediate damage to health of any of the public or of the workers at Windscale”.

Yet subsequent studies have shown that the radiation contamination was at least double what his highly censored report claimed.

An atomic cloud covered an area stretching from Norway to Germany and the leak has been attributed to at least 200 local cases of cancer – with half proving fatal.

The official report blamed personnel rather the technology, which had been developed prior to the detonation of Britain’s first nuclear bomb in 1953.

It claimed the primary cause was technicians heating the uranium in Pile 1 too soon and too rapidly.

[On This Day: Blast kills 266 coal miners and rescuers at Welsh pit]

Yet according to Vic Goodwin, a physicist who risked his life trying to quell the inferno, the hastily-built reactor was “dodgy” from the start.

Two days before the fire the fuel in the reactor had failed to reach a high enough temperature when operators activated Pile 1.

The following day, a second heating was applied, which is what the report blamed – despite allegedly being a routine procedure at the plant.

Then, on the third day, October 10, the uranium in the pile’s 3,440 fuel channels was glowing cherry red and technicians were unable to cool it down.

Workers, including Mr Goodwin, were sent in to create a “firebreak” by clearing fuel around the channel.

“We were working like fury,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “But we were too busy to panic.”

By midnight the blaze was a full inferno and atomic clouds were drifting across Europe while water failed to douse it.

The fire was eventually extinguished with inert gas from the nearby Calder Hall Plant, which was generating both electricity and plutonium, rendering Windscale obsolete.

The nuclear disaster came just a month after a more serious leak in the Soviet Union following an explosion at the the Mayak bomb factory, 1,200 miles east of Moscow.

Radioactive fallout across 5,800 square miles forced the evacuation of 10,000 people, although authorities tried to hush it up.

Several other disasters have occurred across the globe since then, including the Three Mile Island meltdown in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania in 1979.

Yet all have been dwarfed by the 1986 Chernobyl Reactor explosion in the Soviet Union, which released 1,000 times the radiation of Windscale and killed 9,000 people.

A 1,000 square-mile area around the former power plant in modern-day Ukraine remains is barred to members of the public.