The entry Seven Feet tells how the fire in Pile No. 1 at Windscale started and how the committee under Sir William Penney explained it. This piece follows the report after it left Windscale: who read it, who decided what the public would be told, and when the rest came out.

Ten days

The committee was announced on 15 October 1957, five days after the glowing channels were seen, with terms of reference “to investigate the causes of the accident at Windscale No. 1 Pile on 10th October, 1957, and the measures taken to deal with it and its consequences; and to report”. It sat at Windscale Works from 17 to 26 October with one day’s break. Most of its witnesses it called; it also invited anyone on the works with something to say to come forward, and four men did. It took written evidence in graphs, reports and minutes, some of them calculations made during the inquiry at its own request, and it visited both piles, Pile No. 2 having been shut down on 18 October so that the committee could see a pile in the condition No. 1 had been in before the accident. “As this report was required urgently,” a footnote says, “it has not been possible within the time available to digest this material into properly edited appendices.” The committee was conscious, it wrote, “of the great public anxiety concerning this accident”, and reported “as soon as we had been able to consider the technical evidence sufficiently to discharge our terms of reference”. It had not, “in ten days”, made a full technical assessment, and it was “not properly constituted to recommend detailed organisational changes”. It recommended a technical working party within the Authority, a review of the Industrial Group’s organisation, clear responsibility for health and safety, permissible levels for short exposures laid down in advance, and no restart of Pile No. 2 until its instrumentation was adequate for a Wigner release and the whole question of controlled release had been reviewed. The report is dated 26 October 1957.

Washington

The Soviet satellite had gone up on 4 October. From 23 to 25 October Harold Macmillan was in Washington with President Eisenhower, and at the end of three days of meetings the two issued a Declaration of Common Purpose. Its third paragraph said that the President “will request the Congress to amend the Atomic Energy Act as may be necessary and desirable to permit of close and fruitful collaboration of scientists and engineers of Great Britain, the United States, and other friendly countries”. The Act had shut Britain out of American weapons work since 1946; reopening it was the object of British policy, and the reputation of the British programme was the argument. Richard Wakeford’s summary, fifty years on, was that Macmillan, “whose government was involved in delicate negotiations to re-establish nuclear weapons cooperation with the USA, decided that just a summary of the Penney Report should be published”.

The decision was not made at once. On 28 October the Authority’s executive considered the report, recommended its publication in full, and sent it to the Prime Minister. On the 29th Macmillan discussed it with the Authority’s chairman, Sir Edwin Plowden, asked the Lord President of the Council to obtain at once the views of the Medical Research Council, and had the report circulated widely to ministers and senior officials under a covering letter that said publication was intended; the Ministry of Defence agreed that day. That afternoon, answering three questions in the Commons, he said he had received the report “only this morning”; that it was “very technical, and not very easy for a layman to follow”; and, pressed by Peart for an assurance that the House would be told its findings, “I will certainly make a full report to this House.” George Brown asked him to consider a further inquiry under someone less close to the security side than Penney. Hugh Gaitskell asked him to consider either publishing the report or holding that inquiry. “I will consider all these things,” Macmillan said, “but I am also interested in maintaining, as I am sure is the right hon. Member for Leeds, South, the tremendous, unique reputation of our scientists in this field throughout the world.” Fort asked whether a similar accident could occur in the reactors at Calder Hall and those being built for the electricity authorities. “I think that, broadly speaking, that is the case,” the Prime Minister said, meaning that it could not. F. Anderson, who said he had been on the spot, told him that the public in West Cumberland had no confidence in the inquiry and that many hours had passed before anyone was told anything. The Cabinet had the accident on its agenda on 6 November, as the fourth of ten items, between Egypt and wages policy.

The memorandum

On Friday 8 November the White Paper, Cmnd. 302, was laid before Parliament and Macmillan made his statement. The paper contained “a less technical version, prepared by Sir William Penney’s Committee, of their Report on the cause of the accident and the measures taken to deal with it”, the committee’s chapters on the protection of the workers and the public, the comments of an independent committee of the Medical Research Council, a memorandum from the Authority, an annex on the power stations and the terms of reference of three new committees. “This accident occurred during a routine maintenance operation,” the Prime Minister told the House. “It was, of course, a serious matter, and caused disturbance to a large number of people. Hon. Members will, however, wish to consider this matter in a proper perspective. In the last twelve years, we in Britain have built up this new industry without a single serious injury caused by radiation, and there is no evidence that this accident has done any significant harm to any person, animal or property.” He paid tribute to “the courage, energy and resourcefulness of those at the installation after the accident” and to “the quiet confidence and absence of alarm of the general population in the Windscale area”, and gave “the reassurance that the accident at Windscale has no bearing on the safety of the nuclear power stations being built for the Electricity Authorities”. Harold Davies asked whether an unusual experiment had been taking place. “There was no particular or special experimentation for either civil or military purposes being done at the time of this release,” Macmillan said; the operation was called a Wigner release and was “one which is done at intervals”. Asked why the Fleck committees could not be independent of the Authority, he answered that “all the people who really are the experts in this are, in one way or another, employed under the Atomic Energy Authority”.

What the White Paper did not contain was the report, and the Prime Minister’s own memorandum in it said why. Lord Lawson read the passage to the House of Lords on 21 November. “The report of the Committee of Inquiry is a report made to the Authority to assist them in discharging their statutory responsibility for managing the Windscale establishment. It is a technical document dealing with the design and operation of a defence installation. It also presupposes considerable knowledge of the technology of this particular pile. It would not be in the national interest to publish the report.” The memorandum went on to give the Authority’s account of responsibility, which Lawson also read: “the Authority state that the accident was due partly to inadequacies in the instrumentation provided at Windscale for the maintenance operation that was being performed at the time of the accident, and partly to faults of judgment by the operating staff, these faults of judgment being themselves attributable to weaknesses of organisation.” “That,” Lawson said, “is one of the matters which is causing a good deal of perturbation in the minds of the workmen and skilled men in that area.” He had been a miner, and he said that if he were one of those concerned he “should not spend too much time on the deficiencies of the workmen, or whoever has been blamed”; what had struck him was that the Authority had made no arrangements for an accident, as every great industry did.

The Lords

The Lords’ debate was the fullest public hearing the accident got, and the Minister of Power, Lord Mills, gave in reply the fullest account any minister gave. He explained the piles, the stored energy and the annealing, “in fact, an annealing process”, that “takes several days to complete”; said that on several previous occasions a second heating had been needed; that the committee had found the second heating “applied too soon and at too rapid a rate”; that it “caused the failure of one or more cartridges whose contents then oxidised slowly and, eventually, led to the fire”; and that the fire “was discovered in the afternoon of October 10”, fought through the night and “brought under control on the following morning by the use of water”. He read the Authority’s statement of responsibility again, and added: “I can assure the noble Lord that there is no question of finding fault with any individual. Every man did his utmost, and did his duty with the instruments and the information with which he was provided.” He read the Medical Research Council’s finding that it was “in the highest degree unlikely that any harm had been done to the health of anybody, whether a worker in the Windscale plant or a member of the general public”, and the Authority’s conclusion, in Annex V, that “the accident which happened at Windscale could not happen with the Calder Hall reactors or with the reactors being built for the electricity authorities”, because their coolant ran in a closed circuit and could be used to cool a failed cartridge rather than fan it. Viscount Stonehaven, who had read the White Paper closely, had already told the House what he took from it: that since the scanning gear could not work without air and the release could not work with it, “the control of the Wigner releases must depend upon two instruments: the thermocoupler in the pile, graphite and fuel, and the power meter”, and that with those two instruments “correctly placed”, or calibrated if they could not be, control was possible. That was the Penney report’s central finding, worked out by a peer from the summary, and nobody contradicted him.

The three committees

Sir Alexander Fleck, the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, had agreed at the Prime Minister’s request to chair three committees, on the Authority’s organisation, on its arrangements for health and safety, and on the technical evaluation of the accident, with a brief that included advising on the restarting of Pile No. 2. On 28 November Macmillan told the Commons that the organisation committee hoped to report before the Christmas recess, the health and safety committee at the beginning of January, and the technical committee later, since it had “to rely largely upon the evidence of almost the only experts who are in one way or another employed or giving their services to the Atomic Energy Authority”. Until the reports were ready, “it would be premature to take any view on publication”. Gaitskell had asked on 8 November whether they would be published; the answer then was that the Prime Minister would “certainly carefully consider the question”.

The first report, on organisation, was submitted on 17 December 1957 and published that month as Cmnd. 338; the second, on health and safety, on 20 December, published in January 1958 as Cmnd. 342. The Technical Evaluation Committee sent an interim report on 21 December that was not published, and its final report, presented to the Prime Minister on 17 June 1958, was published on 15 July as Cmnd. 471. It accepted the existing design of uranium fuel cartridge as satisfactory, and found it “necessary to modify the existing design of lithium-magnesium cartridge”, which it “considered to be unsatisfactory”. Its cartridge working party had concluded that there was no intrinsically safe maximum temperature for the fuel, that the 395 degrees allowed in normal running might be unsafe in a shut-down pile with no blowers and no burst-cartridge detection, and that the newest mark of lithium-magnesium cartridge “could deteriorate severely and might oxidise rapidly, or even catch fire, at temperatures as low as 350°C or 400°C”. Some of those cartridges, taken out of the closed Pile No. 2, were found severely damaged, presumably from its own uneventful anneal of July 1957. The same day the technical report came out it was announced that Pile No. 1 would not be rehabilitated. On 24 October 1958 it was announced that Pile No. 2 would not be restarted. The Nuclear Installations Act of 1959 set up a licensing regime for reactors and an inspectorate to run it, which sat first in the ministry and from 1975 in the Health and Safety Executive; the inspectorate’s own history begins with the fire and the Fleck inquiry. American scientists came to Risley in December 1957 for a conference on the accident, and British scientists went to the United States in January 1958 for another on its health and safety; the amendment to the Atomic Energy Act that the Declaration had promised followed in 1958.

The file

The report went to the Public Record Office under the thirty-year rule and was opened to readers in January 1988. Lorna Arnold, the Authority’s historian, published her account of the accident in 1992 with the report as an appendix; her chronology of the months after it is drawn, she says, from an appendix to the first Fleck report. In 2017, for the sixtieth anniversary, the Journal of Radiological Protection printed the report in full from a copy supplied by The National Archives from file AB 86/25, with the Crown’s copyright line and the Open Government Licence on its last page and the journal’s Creative Commons licence on its first, which is how it can be quoted and its thermocouple drawing reproduced in the entry. Arnold’s judgement of the operation of the piles was that it had been “an accident waiting to happen”. Wakeford’s, of the thirty years, was that “the somewhat battered UKAEA wanted to ‘move on’ after the accident, and that the cause of the accident as identified by the Penney Inquiry should be regarded, if at all possible, as ‘the final word’”.

The committee’s own last words were about the people. “While in the above conclusions we have naturally concentrated on the faults and deficiencies, we must pay tribute to the efficient and energetic way in which the accident was dealt with once it was appreciated. Due to the efforts of the Windscale staff, a worse accident was averted.” The men who read that in 1957 were the few who were sent the report. The men it was about read, in the White Paper and the newspapers, of “faults of judgment by the operating staff”.

Sources

• William Penney and others, Report on the accident at Windscale No. 1 Pile on 10 October 1957, 26 October 1957, reproduced in the Journal of Radiological Protection 37, 2017: chapter I, the footnote, chapters VII and VIII, and the licence lines. iopscience.iop.org
• Atomic Energy Establishment, Windscale (Accident), House of Commons, 29 October 1957, columns 32 to 36; 8 November 1957, columns 465 to 468; 28 November 1957, columns 1273 to 1274. 29 October, 8 November, 28 November
• Windscale Atomic Plant Accident, House of Lords, 21 November 1957, columns 448 to 476: Lord Lawson, Viscount Stonehaven and Lord Mills. columns 448 to 457, columns 459 to 476
• Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harold Macmillan, Declaration of Common Purpose, 25 October 1957. presidency.ucsb.edu
• Lorna Arnold, Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident, Macmillan, 1992, Appendix I (the chronology of 26 October 1957 to 24 October 1958, with the executive’s recommendation, the covering letter, the Fleck dates, the conferences and the announcements), Appendix V (the cartridge working party on temperatures) and Appendix VI (the lithium-magnesium cartridges and the Fleck technical report’s wording). link.springer.com
• Richard Wakeford, “The Windscale reactor accident—50 years on”, Journal of Radiological Protection 27, 2007, for the summary-only decision, the “final word” and Arnold’s “an accident waiting to happen”. iopscience.iop.org
• “Inspectorates”, History of Occupational Safety and Health, for the Act of 1959 and the inspectorate. historyofosh.org.uk
• The National Archives, catalogue entry for CAB 128/31/78, the Cabinet conclusions of 6 November 1957, for the agenda. beta.nationalarchives.gov.uk