Extinguishing the Atom: The Absurd Reality of the Windscale Fire

Decades before Chernobyl, the world's first catastrophic nuclear reactor fire occurred on the coast of Northern England. In 1957, the core of the Windscale nuclear facility, built hastily to provide plutonium for the British atomic bomb project, ignited into a massive, unstoppable uranium inferno. Standard nuclear physics dictates that pouring water onto a burning uranium fire will cause a devas...