Speaker 1: Pushkin. A nasty flu bug was going around Cumberland, in
Speaker 1: the northwest of England. Tom Tooey hadn't got it, but
Speaker 1: his wife and kids had, so he had taken the
Speaker 1: day off to look after them. At five o'clock in
Speaker 1: the afternoon, he got a call from work.
Speaker 2: Can you come in?
Speaker 1: There's a fire. Good God, said Towey. He got in
Speaker 1: his car and drove the quiet country lanes to his workplace.
Speaker 1: Cumberland was remote, They're not that remote. There were farms
Speaker 1: and villages. People lived there. That was a concern because
Speaker 1: to his workplace was a nuclear reactor. How bad was
Speaker 1: it exactly for a nuclear reactor to be on fire? Too?
Speaker 1: He wasn't sure. Nuclear technology was still very new in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven. Only just over a decade had passed
Speaker 1: since the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Speaker 1: The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Schnobyl laid
Speaker 1: decades in the future as too. He later reflected, mankind
Speaker 1: had never faced anything like this ever before, So no,
Speaker 1: Tom Towey wasn't sure exactly how bad it was that
Speaker 1: the nuclear reactor was on fire, but clearly it wasn't good.
Speaker 1: How much radioactivity might leak out if the fire got worse,
Speaker 1: how much might be leaking out already. The wife of
Speaker 1: another worker recalls getting a phone call at about the
Speaker 1: same time as Tooey was called in. Where's the baby,
Speaker 1: asked the worker in his proud, said the wife. In
Speaker 1: the garden getting some sun. Bring him inside, said the worker.
Speaker 1: Close the doors and the windows. Oh, unlock the hens
Speaker 1: in the henhouse. Then don't go out. I won't be
Speaker 1: home tonight too. He arrives at Windscale. It's a collection
Speaker 1: of stark concrete buildings on the coast with two massive chimneys.
Speaker 1: It was built in a hurry just a few years ago.
Speaker 1: Why the hurry? The United States and the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: both had the nuclear bomb. The British government wanted the
Speaker 1: bomb too. Besides, uclear energy was new, exciting and full
Speaker 1: of possibilities, As the UK Atomic Energy Authority was eager
Speaker 1: to make clear in its promotional films, Windscale is unique.
Speaker 2: It is science fiction, intruding on our sober lives and
Speaker 2: let us up very great produce our plutonium, a pure
Speaker 2: atomic fuel of both industrial and weapons projects.
Speaker 1: Too. He thinks had better see this fire for himself.
Speaker 1: There's only one way to do that. He climbs eighty
Speaker 1: feet up a metal staircase to an inspection hole. He
Speaker 1: lifts the metal cover of the hole and peers down
Speaker 1: into the reactor. Below him is a raging inferno. A
Speaker 1: thought flashes across Tom to his mind, what a bloody
Speaker 1: mess we're in. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
Speaker 1: cautionary tales. Lorna Rainbow started school a year later than
Speaker 1: she could have. The school was over a mile from
Speaker 1: the farm her family rented, and they didn't have the
Speaker 1: time to walk her there and back. You had to
Speaker 1: work all hours to make ends meet as a tenant
Speaker 1: farmer in southern England in the early nineteen twenties. When
Speaker 1: Lorna was five, her parents thought she was probably still
Speaker 1: a bit too young to walk the mile to school
Speaker 1: on her own, but at six, off she went. The
Speaker 1: walk to school was down a rutted lane, dusty in
Speaker 1: the summer, muddy in the winter. Traffic wasn't a problem.
Speaker 1: There might be an occasional horse and cart, but the
Speaker 1: lane passed only a couple of other houses. The main danger,
Speaker 1: at least in six year old Lorna's mind, was a
Speaker 1: big oak tree where rumor had it that a man
Speaker 1: had once been hanged. Could it be haunted? Every day?
Speaker 1: Lorna ran past the tree, her heart thumping, But the
Speaker 1: rest of the walk was enchanting. Lorna remembers a lovely
Speaker 1: profusion of wild flowers by the roadside. Birds and birds
Speaker 1: sold tiny emerald green frogs in the puddles in wet
Speaker 1: and stormy. Whether I would sing as I splashed through
Speaker 1: the puddles and my rubber boots in winter every winter
Speaker 1: the magic of snow. The school had just two rooms,
Speaker 1: one for little kids one for bigger kids. Up to
Speaker 1: the age of fourteen, then you'd leave to work on
Speaker 1: a farm, or as a housemaid, or maybe a shop assistant.
Speaker 1: The local town had a Woolworth's. It also had a
Speaker 1: secondary school, and you could sit an exam to earn
Speaker 1: a scholarship, but nobody from Lorna's school had ever even tried.
Speaker 1: Further education wasn't something kids aspired to, especially girls. Lorna
Speaker 1: remembers a poem her grandmother used to recite, be good,
Speaker 1: sweet maid, and let who will be clever. Lorna's dad
Speaker 1: was more encouraging be good, sweet maid. He'd tell her
Speaker 1: of a wink and if you must be clever. On
Speaker 1: the day of the exam, Lorna was terrified. A vast
Speaker 1: school hall, endless rows of desks, and a paper that
Speaker 1: said intelligence test. She'd never seen anything like it. But
Speaker 1: the test turned out to be a wonderful new game.
Speaker 1: At her new school, the girls spoke of loftier ambitions.
Speaker 1: Maybe they could be a nurse, or a teacher, or
Speaker 1: a secretary at least for a few years until they
Speaker 1: got married. Lorna liked English and history, but physics in
Speaker 1: chemistry were barely on the curriculum. I had no idea.
Speaker 1: She recalls that in nineteen thirty two, two scientists in
Speaker 1: Cambridge had split the atom. This fact would be central
Speaker 1: to my later life. In Cambridge in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: a young man called Bill Penny was doing original research
Speaker 1: for his doctorate in quantum physics. Though if you'd met
Speaker 1: him you might not have guessed it. Penny was burly,
Speaker 1: one hundred meter runner and on the soccer pitch, a robust,
Speaker 1: bustling center forward of the old fashioned type. He was
Speaker 1: shy and prone to blushing. He talked in a drawl
Speaker 1: and had a lot sided grin permanently on his face.
Speaker 1: His wooly sweaters were a bit too baggy. He looked
Speaker 1: and spoke, said one journalist, as though he was a
Speaker 1: bit simple. When the Second World War broke out, the
Speaker 1: government asked Penny to make calculations about blast waves from
Speaker 1: explosions as German bombs rained down on London. Penny became
Speaker 1: such an expert that in nineteen forty four he went
Speaker 1: to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project. At first,
Speaker 1: his American colleagues didn't know what to make of him.
Speaker 1: He gave a talk explaining in gruesome detail the effects
Speaker 1: of last waves on the human body, all with that
Speaker 1: amiable grin. They nicknamed him the Smiling Killer. But Penny
Speaker 1: soon won friends. He was completely without pretense. He had
Speaker 1: absolutely no side or standoffishness. Someone who hosted him recalls
Speaker 1: it was like having a teddy bear in the house.
Speaker 1: But the teddy bear had a mind like a razor.
Speaker 1: When the Americans wanted to know how high above Hiroshima
Speaker 1: and Nagasaki to detonate their bombs, it was Penny they
Speaker 1: trusted with the calculation. Afterwards, Penny flew to Japan and
Speaker 1: roamed through the ruined cities, looking for clues that would
Speaker 1: let him calculate exactly how much power the blasted unleashed.
Speaker 1: He worked it out by mapping crumpled gasoline cans. Back
Speaker 1: in Britain, Penny looked forward to a quiet life in academia.
Speaker 1: But the government had other ideas. Britain. They told him
Speaker 1: needed the atom bomb. As it happened, Penny agreed. Had
Speaker 1: seen up close in Japan the horrors of the bomb,
Speaker 1: he bought the logic that Britain would be safer with
Speaker 1: its own nuclear deterrent. But now the war was over,
Speaker 1: the US had decided no longer to share its nuclear
Speaker 1: knowledge with its allies. The only person who can build
Speaker 1: a bomb for Britain, the government told Penny, is you.
Speaker 1: Penny agreed reluctantly to lead a team of scientists that
Speaker 1: rapidly grew from the hundreds to the thousands. One interviewer
Speaker 1: invited Penny to big himself up. How many people are
Speaker 1: working under you, Penny replied, in his laconic drawl about her.
Speaker 1: By nineteen fifty two, Penny was ready for the first
Speaker 1: test of Britain's new atomic technology in a remote part
Speaker 1: of Australia. The Prime Minister waited anxiously to hear if
Speaker 1: the test had failed or succeeded. It said he had
Speaker 1: two telegrams ready. One began, tough luck, Dr Penny, the
Speaker 1: other well done, Sir William. A journalist later asked Sir
Speaker 1: William Penny to describe how the test had gone. It
Speaker 1: went off, he replied, like a bomb. The British government
Speaker 1: hoped to use the successful test to persuade America to
Speaker 1: agree to a partnership to share nuclear knowledge. But while
Speaker 1: Britain had been catching up, America had moved ahead from
Speaker 1: the A bomb to the H bomb. H bombs worked
Speaker 1: very differently and were much more powerful. Britain would have
Speaker 1: to build an H bomb too. They'd need plutonium, lots
Speaker 1: of plutonium, and quickly they'd manufacture it. At Windscale Cautionary
Speaker 1: tails will be back after the break. What a bloody
Speaker 1: mess we're in. Tom Tooy closes the inspection hole and
Speaker 1: descends the eighty feet of metal steps, thinking about his options.
Speaker 1: The nuclear reactor at Windscale was cooled by air, not
Speaker 1: by water. If something's too hot, blowing more air on
Speaker 1: it is generally a good way to cool it down.
Speaker 1: But if something's on fire blowing air on it is
Speaker 1: going to make the fire worse. Could he turn off
Speaker 1: the fans to try to put the fire out? He could,
Speaker 1: but it was risky. Only part of the reactor was
Speaker 1: on fire, the fans were still cooling the rest. Turning
Speaker 1: off the fans could make the rest overheat, which might
Speaker 1: make things worse. It was a last resort. Could he
Speaker 1: dump water on the reactor to try to put the
Speaker 1: fire out? He could, but it was risky. The reactor
Speaker 1: core was made from graphite. Picture a kind of honeycomb,
Speaker 1: and inside each hole a series of metal canisters containing
Speaker 1: uranium fuel. What would happen if you dumped a load
Speaker 1: of water on a burning mass of uranium, metal and graphite.
Speaker 1: Nobody was sure, as Tom Tooey said, mankind had never
Speaker 1: faced anything like this, ever, that it might release gas
Speaker 1: that could cause an explosion. Water was a second from
Speaker 1: last resort. Workers at Windscale had been trying to create
Speaker 1: a firebreak by using steel poles to push the uranium
Speaker 1: canisters out of the honeycomb holes around the part of
Speaker 1: the core where the fire was burning. Now dripping with
Speaker 1: sweat in their heavy protective suits, they start trying to
Speaker 1: shove the burning canisters out of the fiery core itself.
Speaker 1: It's hard and canisters are twisted by the heat. The
Speaker 1: poles come out, glowing red and dripping molten steel. They
Speaker 1: need more steel poles. They made the scaffolding on a
Speaker 1: nearby construction site. They were heroes that night, an officer
Speaker 1: later said of the workers. But were their heroics having
Speaker 1: an effect? At close to midnight, Tom Tooey climbs the
Speaker 1: eighty feet of steps again to peer through the inspection hole.
Speaker 1: The fire has spread. At Lorna Rainbow's secondary school for girls,
Speaker 1: nobody had ever gone on to university. Lorna's teachers encouraged
Speaker 1: her to sit the scholarship exams once again. She aced them.
Speaker 1: Soon after she finished her English degree, the Second World
Speaker 1: War broke out. As men signed up to fight, women
Speaker 1: filled the jobs they vacated. Lorna received a telegram from
Speaker 1: the War Office inviting her to interview for the post
Speaker 1: of Junior administrative Assistant. At first, she felt bewilled. There
Speaker 1: was so much to learn, she recalls, and I was
Speaker 1: woefully ignorant. I had no office experience and knew nothing
Speaker 1: about the army. She began by arranging rooms for meetings
Speaker 1: and being a general gopher. Then her boss asked her
Speaker 1: to write up the meeting minutes and then to draft
Speaker 1: papers and briefing notes. He'd go through them with her,
Speaker 1: sentence by sentence. What's your basis for saying this? Should
Speaker 1: you explain that point more fully? Think? Who's your readership?
Speaker 1: Tell your story in a way your readers will understand.
Speaker 1: She thanked him for his kindness in mentoring her, and
Speaker 1: he laughed he wasn't being kind, He'd simply seen how
Speaker 1: quickly she could learn. Lorna was promoted to work on
Speaker 1: plans for the occupation of Berlin. When Germany surrendered, she
Speaker 1: was sent to Berlin. She spent her first night in
Speaker 1: a ground floor flat with broken windows, listening to Russian
Speaker 1: soldiers marauled through the streets, singing drunken songs and shooting
Speaker 1: in the air. What if they came in through her
Speaker 1: broken window? The next morning she mentioned her concern to
Speaker 1: an officer here. He said, have a revolver. Lorna worked
Speaker 1: on setting up administration of the British Stone of Berlin
Speaker 1: and was surprised to find that she was senior to
Speaker 1: some of the army clerks. Yes, sir, let's say to her,
Speaker 1: Miss Rainbow, Sir. But the British were strapped for resources.
Speaker 1: Their needs support from America. Lorna was sent to Washington
Speaker 1: to help with the negotiation. At a lunch to celebrate
Speaker 1: the deal, the Secretary of State began his speech with
Speaker 1: a smile in Lorna's direction. Lady and gentlemen. Lorna spent
Speaker 1: three years in Washington, profiled in the newspapers as a
Speaker 1: vital cog in the diplomatic wheel. Then she resigned. Why
Speaker 1: it seemed perfectly natural, She later explained, the world was
Speaker 1: changing from a wartime to a post war situation. Women
Speaker 1: who had filled the gaps during the war were generally
Speaker 1: being displaced. It never occurred to me to think that
Speaker 1: I had established any rights to a special position in
Speaker 1: this man's world. With hindsight, she says, she could have
Speaker 1: continued her career, but at the time, I simply felt
Speaker 1: that I'd done my bit. Lorna moved back to England
Speaker 1: and got a low level office job, and her husband
Speaker 1: wasn't that what women were supposed to do? Be good,
Speaker 1: sweet maid, and let who will be clever? At one
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning, the phone rings at the home
Speaker 1: of the Chief Constable of Cumberland. A few years earlier,
Speaker 1: he'd met bosses at Windscale to agree on procedures in
Speaker 1: case of a major emergency, which was he was assured
Speaker 1: only a remote possibility. Could he dust off that file
Speaker 1: and start to implement the procedures? The Chief Constable makes
Speaker 1: calls through the night. A fleet of buses descends on Cumberland,
Speaker 1: ready to evacuate villages downwind of the reactor. At Windscale.
Speaker 1: Tom Toohey searches desperately for an alternative to water as
Speaker 1: a way to quench the fire. A huge amount of
Speaker 1: some inert gas like argone might do it. But where
Speaker 1: is he going to get a huge amount of argone
Speaker 1: in rural England. In the middle of the night, he
Speaker 1: tracks down a tanker of carbon dioxide. It's worth a try.
Speaker 1: At four in the morning, he pumps in the carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: then climbs the eighty feet of steps again to peer
Speaker 1: through the inspection hole. The fire still burns. They'll have
Speaker 1: to risk the water. Two. He lines up the hoses
Speaker 1: with the honeycomb holes and turns on the taps. Sir
Speaker 1: William Penny had got a knighthood in nineteen fifty two
Speaker 1: for building Briton's for A bomb, But the reward he
Speaker 1: really wanted was a quiet life in academia, not a chance,
Speaker 1: said the government. You need to build us an H bomb.
Speaker 1: Penny dutifully got to work, despite giving everyone the general
Speaker 1: impression that he would much rather be digging his garden.
Speaker 1: The task became urgent. America and Russia were discussing an
Speaker 1: international treaty to ban nuclear tests. Penny would have to
Speaker 1: test his H bomb before that ban came in. He
Speaker 1: knew he wasn't ready, and he thought the test might fail.
Speaker 1: It did, but it brought a backup plan, a massive
Speaker 1: A bomb that might make a big enough blast to
Speaker 1: fool a lay person into thinking it was an H bomb.
Speaker 1: Those who knew the secret called the massive A bomb
Speaker 1: the Penny Dreadful. It went off impressively. Assembled journalists duly
Speaker 1: reported that Penny's H bomb test had been a great success.
Speaker 1: Penny said nothing. In nineteen fifty seven, the US President
Speaker 1: finally agreed to the British Prime Minister's request for a
Speaker 1: nuclear information sharing partnership, but Congress still had to approve
Speaker 1: the deal. The Prime minister could only hope that nothing
Speaker 1: would happen in the meantime that might call into question
Speaker 1: Britain's competence as a nuclear power. Then news reached the
Speaker 1: Prime Minister from Cumberland. The reactor at Windscale was on
Speaker 1: fire and nobody knew how bad it might be. Water
Speaker 1: gushes through the hoses onto the burning reactor core. Tom
Speaker 1: Tooey waits anxiously, an explosion might kill him, but there's
Speaker 1: no explosion. Once again, he climbs the eighty feet of
Speaker 1: steps to peer through the inspection hole. The water isn't working,
Speaker 1: the fire is still raging. It's time for the last
Speaker 1: resort two. He shuts off the fans, the fire dies out,
Speaker 1: the rest of the reactor doesn't overheat. At midday, the
Speaker 1: Chief Constable of Cumberland gets another phone call, panic over
Speaker 1: no need to evacuate any villages. Tom Tooey drives back
Speaker 1: home to his sick wife and children and collapses into bed. Exhausted.
Speaker 1: But why had the fire happened? They were bound to
Speaker 1: be awkward questions from the Americans. They needed answers, and
Speaker 1: quickly the government set up an inquiry and asks their
Speaker 1: go to nuclear experts to share it. Sir William Penny
Speaker 1: lorna rainbow took her husband's name. Now she was Lorna Arnold,
Speaker 1: but her husband turned out to be secretly struggling with
Speaker 1: his sexuality. He came out as gay and left her,
Speaker 1: not daring to tell her to her face. By the
Speaker 1: time she received his letter of farewell, he had left
Speaker 1: the country and she was left alone with two young
Speaker 1: children and a low level office job. One lunchtime in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight, Lorna sat at the desk in her
Speaker 1: office in London with a cheese sandwich brought from home
Speaker 1: and a cup of instant coffee, trying to summon up
Speaker 1: the enthusiasm to embark on a fresh pile of tedious papers.
Speaker 1: They were sunny outside. She decided to go for a
Speaker 1: walk and cheer herself up with a proper coffee from
Speaker 1: one of the new Italian places that were opening in London.
Speaker 1: There she bumped into a man she hadn't seen for years.
Speaker 1: They'd been in Berlin together. How's your life turned out,
Speaker 1: the man asked, I'm forty two years old, said Lorna.
Speaker 1: I'm bringing up two sons on my own. My job
Speaker 1: doesn't pay much and it bores me senseless. The man
Speaker 1: was shocked. How had that happened. He had seen in
Speaker 1: the war how brilliant Lorna was. Everyone had except Larna herself.
Speaker 1: Leave it with me, he said. Lorna got a letter
Speaker 1: inviting her to an interview with the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Speaker 1: We're expanding our staff, the director explained, because we're studying
Speaker 1: the aftermath of an incident at Windscale. Lorna said, I
Speaker 1: know nothing about science. I can't possibly be of any
Speaker 1: use to you. She got the job. Cautionary tales will
Speaker 1: be back after the break. Just six days had passed
Speaker 1: since the fire when so William Penny arrived at Windscale.
Speaker 1: He called in the workers, still drained from their sleepless night.
Speaker 1: One recalls feeling intimidated at first Penny was a big man,
Speaker 1: but he soon found that Penny was also extremely pleasant, courteous, thoughtful,
Speaker 1: very polite. Indeed, the story Penny heard began five years earlier.
Speaker 1: Soon after Windscale opened, workers had noticed a sudden increase
Speaker 1: in temperature in part of the reactor core. Nobody understood it.
Speaker 1: Nuclear technology was still very new. It turned out to
Speaker 1: be something called Vigner energy. The reactor core, remember, was
Speaker 1: a graphite honeycomb in which were placed cartridges of uranium
Speaker 1: as radioactive particles from the urania and buffeted that graphite honeycomb.
Speaker 1: They knocked atoms in the graphite out of place. This
Speaker 1: caused a build up of Vigner energy, which could randomly
Speaker 1: release itself in a burst of heat. This was a problem.
Speaker 1: You don't want bits of your reactor randomly overheating. To
Speaker 1: prevent that, they'd have to release the Vigner energy in
Speaker 1: a controlled way. Every few months, the windscale workers performed
Speaker 1: a Vigner release. They let the reactor core heat up,
Speaker 1: not too much, just enough for the graphite atoms to
Speaker 1: safely rearrange themselves. They'd done this Vigner release eight times.
Speaker 1: It worked kind of but not in the same way.
Speaker 1: Every time, as they let the core heat up, it
Speaker 1: would heat unevenly. They'd have to decid keep heating to
Speaker 1: get the cooler parts of the core to the required temperature,
Speaker 1: or stop heating to prevent the hotter parts from getting
Speaker 1: too hot. There was no operating manual. The workers just
Speaker 1: had to figure it out as best they could. On
Speaker 1: the ninth Vigna release, it seemed they'd applied too much
Speaker 1: heat and the core caught fire. But what really caused
Speaker 1: the fire was that nobody at Windscale really understood what
Speaker 1: they were doing. Why did each vignim release happen differently?
Speaker 1: They didn't know, and they were working with only partial information.
Speaker 1: There weren't enough instruments in the core to check temperatures everywhere.
Speaker 1: They were also understaffed. In the hurry to build the bomb,
Speaker 1: the British nuclear program had expanded too before enough workers
Speaker 1: could be properly trained. After ten days in Windscale, Penny
Speaker 1: wrote up his findings. These explained the underlying problems. He
Speaker 1: didn't blame the workers for the fire, and he praised
Speaker 1: how they had fought it. They were prompt and efficient,
Speaker 1: he said, and displayed considerable devotion to duty. Penny's report
Speaker 1: landed on the Prime Minister's desk. The Prime Minister was
Speaker 1: horrified it made the British nuclear program look amateurish. If
Speaker 1: members of the US Congress saw this, they might refuse
Speaker 1: to approve Britain as a nuclear partner. Penny's report couldn't
Speaker 1: be published. The Prime Minister ordered that the report be
Speaker 1: locked away in a filing cabinet and issued his own
Speaker 1: summary instead. His summary blamed the workers. They'd made an
Speaker 1: error of judgment, he said, sorry, won't happen again. Congress
Speaker 1: approved the NUCTAR partnership. Britain's scientists now had access to
Speaker 1: US expertise. A few months later, the US delegation visited Windscale.
Speaker 1: They were shown round by high powered bosses who hadn't
Speaker 1: been at Windscale during the fire, and told a story
Speaker 1: that bore no relation to what actually happened. Tom Tooey
Speaker 1: had to sit and listen, and they didn't let him
Speaker 1: say a word. What did you think of that? An
Speaker 1: interviewer later asked tooe How polite do you want me
Speaker 1: to be too? He replied, I thought, what a shower
Speaker 1: of bus. Under British law, secret government papers are usually
Speaker 1: published after thirty years have passed. Thirty years after Windscale
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty seven, the time approached for the Penny
Speaker 1: Report to be taken out of its filing cabinet and
Speaker 1: made available to the public. That prospect worried the Records
Speaker 1: officer of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. The problem was
Speaker 1: that the Penny Report on its own wouldn't tell the
Speaker 1: full story of what had happened at Windscale. After writing
Speaker 1: his report, Penny had recommended further investigations into the issues
Speaker 1: he'd identified. Documents from those investigations were due to be
Speaker 1: released later in dribs and drabs, thirty years after each
Speaker 1: was filed away. Why don'ly release them all at once,
Speaker 1: said the records officer, And I'll write a book to
Speaker 1: accompany them. It's an important story, she said. It deserves
Speaker 1: to be told in a way that readers will understand.
Speaker 1: Good idea, said her bosses. When her book was published,
Speaker 1: the records officer got letters from workers who've been there
Speaker 1: at the time of the fire for thirty years. They said,
Speaker 1: we've been blamed for an error of judgment. Thank you
Speaker 1: for making it clear that it wasn't our fault. The
Speaker 1: records officer's name was Lorna Arnold. Lorna was now in
Speaker 1: her early seventies. She should have retired, but she had
Speaker 1: found a job she loved. Lorna was assisting a historian
Speaker 1: to produce an epic three volume history of Britain's post
Speaker 1: war nuclear work. When the historian retired, with the third
Speaker 1: volume not yet finished, Lorna took it upon herself to
Speaker 1: finish the job. They could not bear, said Lorna, to
Speaker 1: see the waste of years of arduous research in archives
Speaker 1: to which no other historians had or might ever have access.
Speaker 1: When Lorna was at school, her science teacher hadn't even
Speaker 1: mentioned the splitting of the atom. Now she was writing
Speaker 1: nuclear history with the help of a new friend, Bill Penny,
Speaker 1: now retired and finally enjoying the quiet life. Lorna spent
Speaker 1: hours at Penny's home, going over her research together and
Speaker 1: getting an education in how little government ministers sometimes understand
Speaker 1: about technology. Lorna Penny would say, where did you get
Speaker 1: this garbage? A ministerial memo? She explained, Penny drawled Fellow
Speaker 1: didn't know what he was talking about. When Lorna was
Speaker 1: eighty one, a new boss at the Atomic Energy Authority
Speaker 1: insisted that she had to retire, but others knew how
Speaker 1: brilliant she still was and found a budget for a
Speaker 1: typist to help her finish the book at home. It
Speaker 1: was published in two thousand and one. Lorna was eighty
Speaker 1: six years old. Remember the windscale worker who called his wife,
Speaker 1: bring the baby inside, shut the doors and windows. He
Speaker 1: was right to be cautious. The windscale fire turned out
Speaker 1: to have been much more serious than anyone realized at
Speaker 1: the time. Experts now believe that perhaps a hundred locals
Speaker 1: may have died earlier than they otherwise would have from
Speaker 1: cancers caused by radiation that leaked from the burning reactor.
Speaker 1: Nobody had defined in advance what level of radiation leakage
Speaker 1: might be tolerable for the local population that had to
Speaker 1: work it out on the fly as the fire raged.
Speaker 1: The calculations seemed reasonable with the knowledge they had at
Speaker 1: the time, but that knowledge was incomplete. Nuclear technology was
Speaker 1: still very new. Typically, on cautionary tales, we like to
Speaker 1: draw lessons from disasters, and if you want a lesson
Speaker 1: from Windscale, it's this. When someone's in a hurry roll
Speaker 1: out a dangerous technology, don't be too quick to assume
Speaker 1: that they know what they're doing. And when they assure
Speaker 1: you that they do, don't be too quick to believe them.
Speaker 1: But I also want to take a step back, because
Speaker 1: to tell these stories of disasters we rely on others.
Speaker 1: People like Bill Penny, who asked thoughtful questions of the
Speaker 1: windscale workers straight after the fire and wrote a fair
Speaker 1: and insightful report. People like Lorna Arnold, who thirty years
Speaker 1: later wrote a book to put that report in context.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, the fiftieth anniversary of the
Speaker 1: Windscale Fire, the BBC made a documentary. Now in her nineties,
Speaker 1: Lorna agreed to take part. She was still as committed
Speaker 1: as ever telling a story that gave credit where it
Speaker 1: was due.
Speaker 3: Tom Tooey was the most impressive character. He was pretty
Speaker 3: young for his senior post. He was a lively, handsome man,
Speaker 3: sort of bold features at the mass of gorgeous auburn
Speaker 3: hair flowing back from his forehead.
Speaker 1: Tom Tooey was brave and decisive and fighting the fire.
Speaker 1: He's a hero, no doubt of the Windscale story. But
Speaker 1: I also want to celebrate Lorna Arnold, because sometimes the
Speaker 1: storyteller can be a hero too. For a full list
Speaker 1: of sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright,
Speaker 1: Alice Fines, and Ryan Billy. It's produced by Georgia Mills
Speaker 1: and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise bend A d Afhaffrey edited
Speaker 1: the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
Speaker 1: the work of Jacob Weisberg, Gretta Cohene, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan,
Speaker 1: Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. You can support Cautionary Tales
Speaker 1: by joining My Cautionary Club at Patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: Cautionary Club for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad free listening,
Speaker 1: and other exciting perks. Alternatively, you can join Pushkin Plus
Speaker 1: on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our
Speaker 1: show and others across the Pushkin network.
Speaker 2: You speaking of Start,