WI: Major Windscale, Hanford, and/or Oak Ridge Reactor Fire

Delta Force

Banned
In October 1957, one of the worst nuclear incidents in history occurred at the Windscale reactor in the United Kingdom. The Windscale Fire remains the fourth largest nuclear incident in history, with only the incidents at the Fukushima and Chernobyl reactors and the Soviet Mayak military reprocessing facility being worse. Windscale was similar to the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge and the B Reactor at Hanford, but with one crucial difference. At the insistence of Sir John Cockcroft, the reactor had been equipped with filters to capture the smoke from any fire at the facility. While they were called Cockcroft's Follies at the time because of their expense, during the Windscale Fire they helped prevent an even larger incident by capturing over 99% of the materials release.

If Cockcroft's Follies had not been built, or if one of the Manhattan Project reactors at Hanford or Oak Ridge had suffered a fire, what kind of impact might there have been on the British and/or Manhattan Project nuclear programs? Might the Western nuclear programs have moved ahead with an increased focus on safety and have otherwise moved ahead with civilian nuclear power?
 

Delta Force

Banned
X-10 and B Reactor both pushed fuel rods out the back into a cooling water channel, just like Windscale. That means they could experience a fire if a fuel element falls on the floor instead of in the water. The Windscale Fire incident scenario of a fuel element bursting and igniting in the fuel channel could also occur in both reactors. The exact scenario of literally fanning the blaze could occur in X-10, which was air cooled. B Reactor was water cooled.
 
X-10 was 3.5MW Thermal

Windscale -1 was 100 MWth

Chernobyl was 3200 MWth

X-10 just wasn't run as hard as Windscale. No need to, it was a research reactor. Hanford was for production.

Could X-10 Burn?

sure.

Just wasn't likely from the power levels it typically ran at.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Could this have lead to an incident at Hanford? From Wikipedia, but I've read about this elsewhere:

On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Were there any contingency systems to allow for coolant operation at Hanford in the event external power was lost? It was equipped with SCRAM rods and emergency boron systems, but those would simply stop the reaction. They wouldn't be able to lower temperatures and prevent or control a meltdown.
 
I believe there were gravity tanks and diesel gensets.

Hard imagining the cascade failure to get Hanford to get into thermal runaway
 

Delta Force

Banned
I believe there were gravity tanks and diesel gensets.

Hard imagining the cascade failure to get Hanford to get into thermal runaway

Using borated water would have rendered the reactor useless, if it had progressed to that point.

However, the bomb apparently caused its damage by hitting one of four wires leading to Midway Substation, from which power was supplied to Hanford Site (according to this site, citing a Manhattan Project document).

Also, while I haven't been able to find information on weather conditions around March 1945, the summer of 1945 was apparently one of the driest in history. Perhaps a brush fire near Hanford or a forest fire elsewhere could have damaged the power lines or the substation, at forcing Hanford offline for period?
 
US&USSR Reactors were liquid cooled, not aircooled.

That British design was a scary shortcut

Ironically enough, it was actually done because air cooled reactors were thought to be safer by the British authorities. The graphite/water combination was thought to be dangerous due to the risk of a loss-of-coolant accident causing an explosion - there wasn't a suitable site in the UK where Hanford's exclusion zone could be achieved. Air cooling allowed for a chimney that would generate sufficient airflow to cool the reactor under normal conditions.

The dangerous shortcut was taking the reactors out of their designed operating conditions to produce tritium for the British hydrogen bomb. Running on natural uranium as they were designed to, the Windscale piles were relatively safe. The dangers of running on enriched uranium and lithium-magnesium, with a higher than normal fuel load and at higher than normal temperatures, were highlighted by site management and ignored by the authorities.

That the possibility that the abnormal behaviour of the core might be due to a fire wasn't considered is a pretty damning indictment of the safety regime at the time, though, especially as there had been concern about that very scenario. Picking up on the problem two to three days earlier should have been possible, which would have made a huge difference.

Now, if you want something to go badly wrong at Hanford, something like Chernobyl isn't implausible. A loss of coolant accident leading to a steam explosion and fire. You just have to hit the Hanford site operators with the idiot stick that made Chernobyl's operators turn off the main cooling systems to test the backups.
 
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