Qualla: Windscale Piles

Windscale Piles: Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Neal, CC BY-SA 2.0. They were meant to last five years. Pile No. 1 ran for seven before the fire of October 1957 shut it down forever; Pile No. 2 was judged too unsafe to continue and was closed shortly after. In between, they produced enough plutonium for Operation Hurricane, Britain's first nuclear test in the Monte Bello Islands in October 1952. They were built fast, on a Cumbrian coastal site chosen against American safety advice, by a country that needed to be a nuclear power and could not borrow the materials or money to take it slowly. Their story is engineering, geopolitics and accumulating risk - and three people in particular: Sir John Cockcroft, who insisted on the chimney filters everyone laughed at; Christopher Hinton, who designed and built them and then resigned in frustration; and Tom Tuohy, who saved Britain from a far worse disaster than the one that actually happened.

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Image: Malcolm Neal | CC BY-SA 2.0

Windscale Piles: The Decision to Build

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. After the 1946 McMahon Act ended British access to American nuclear secrets, Britain decided it had to build atomic bombs alone. Plutonium was cheaper to produce than enriched uranium - so plutonium it would be. The Americans had built their production reactors at Hanford, far fr...

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Image: Public domain

Windscale Piles: Air, Not Water

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ENERGY.GOV, Public domain. Hinton's engineers concluded an air-cooled reactor would be cheaper, simpler, safer and faster to build than a water-cooled one. R. G. Newell proposed the reactor be encased in a pressure vessel. D. W. Ginns, H. H. Gott and J. L. Dickson designed finned aluminium cartridges aroun...

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Image: ENERGY.GOV | Public domain

Windscale Piles: Cockcroft's Folly

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ENERGY.GOV, Public domain. During construction, Sir John Cockcroft visited the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge in the United States. He found uranium oxide particles in the surrounding area. With 70,000 fuel cartridges to be loaded into the Windscale Piles, even a small percentage failure rate would mea...

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Image: ENERGY.GOV | Public domain

Windscale Piles: Operations and Tritium

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ENERGY.GOV, Public domain. Pile No. 1 went critical in October 1950, Pile No. 2 in June 1951. Tom Tuohy retrieved the first sample of British plutonium on 28 March 1952. Enough Windscale plutonium for an atomic bomb reached the Aldermaston weapons division by August 1952; Britain's first device detonated i...

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Image: ENERGY.GOV | Public domain

Windscale Piles: What Remains

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ENERGY.GOV, Public domain. Pile No. 1 still contains roughly 6,700 fire-damaged fuel elements and 1,700 damaged isotope cartridges. As of estimates made in 2000, the damaged core held about 4 kg of plutonium-239, 69 g of caesium-137, 37 g each of strontium-90 and yttrium-90, 4.1 g of tritium, and smaller q...

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Image: ENERGY.GOV | Public domain