A 90-year-old has opened up for the first time about his heroic efforts to tackle a fire at a plant that worked to create Britain’s first atomic bombs.
David Staton was a 27-year-old electrical engineer working at the Windscale and Calder works – now known as Sellafield – in 1957 when of the ‘piles’, primitive nuclear reactors making plutonium for Britain’s first atomic bombs overheated and caught fire, setting in motion a terrifying series of events.
Now living in Cockermouth, and aged 90, David was called at about 7pm while staying at the Greengarth Hostel – a place where many of his fellow graduates would bunker-down after a day’s work, he was told “Come at once. Pile One is on fire.”
Undeterred, David rushed to the scene. Guided by Tom Tuohy, the deputy general manager who led the heroic efforts that day, David joined five or six other personnel who were tasked with extinguishing the unprecedented fire.
David donned his protective gear before coming face-to-face with the red glow of uranium which was burning inside the pile.
After establishing whether the uranium cartridges had overheated, work began to discharge fuel elements around the fire by creating a firebreak.
“At the time, I didn’t see myself as ‘brave’. We did what we had to do and it was all hands on deck to get on top of the fire”, said David.
David left the site in the early hours of Friday morning, six hours after he first arrived on the scene.
On returning back to the office again later that same morning, and after just a few hours’ sleep, he was told that efforts by the team to extinguish the fire by carbon dioxide had failed, and so had hosing water onto the reactor core.
“Finally the decision was made to switch off the shutdown fans to stop air entering the pile, which to everyone’s delight was enough to starve the fire of oxygen, and allow the water to extinguish it,” said David.
David had been in the changing room just hours before he was alerted to the fire and found that all monitors gave high readings for radioactivity. On leaving the site at 5pm, David noticed puffs of smoke coming from the Pile One chimney.
After the events, neither David nor any of the men alongside him that day, were recognised for their heroic actions.
The Penney Report
A white paper into the incident – known as the Penney report – was published two weeks later but remained classified until 1988.
Windscale was home to the UK’s atomic bomb project and secrecy shrouded the facility in the years of Cold War paranoia.
“Discussions were being had with the United States at the time about sharing its nuclear secrets with the UK scientists, and it was thought that any embarrassing revelations about Windscale could put this at risk,” said David.
“Both piles were permanently shut down and never used again.”
The report blamed “an error of judgement” and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan ordered that it not be released to the public.
The operation of the two piles was made more difficult by the build-up of energy in the graphite moderator, the unreliable burst cartridge detection equipment, and the limited amount of temperature measurements.
Britain’s worst nuclear disaster
It was Britain’s worst nuclear disaster and rated at level five on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. The highest level is seven which was given to Chernobyl in the Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan.
“I’ve not spoken about the events publicly, except with friends and family in all my 64 years since the accident,” said David.
“I was actually reminded last year by my son-in-law. Coincidently he also works in the nuclear industry and has supply connections to Windscale. I was asked if I might like to give a talk about what happened and I suppose the very idea brought back all of those memories and I thought, I must not let what happened be forgotten.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my time working at Windscale. I met my beloved wife Eleanor there of 59 years – she worked in the salaries and wages department and later we would have our two beautiful daughters.
“It was interesting work and whilst I left Windscale behind in 1961 moving to Scotland, I continued to work in the nuclear industry right up until I retired in 1994– I wasn’t put off at all.”
Now that David is settled in his new home at Lancaster Court – an over 60s independent living facility – he is contemplating writing his memoirs, including that of the Windscale Fire, into a book.
He explains: “Now that the public is aware of the full extent of what happened there, I am glad to tell my own story. It’s taken many decades but the record has finally been put straight.”
