Comparison With Other Accidents
The release of radiation by the Windscale fire was greatly exceeded by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, but the fire has been described as the worst reactor accident until Three Mile Island in 1979. Epidemiological estimates put the number of additional cancers caused by the Three Mile Island accident at not more than one; only Chernobyl produced immediate casualties.
Three Mile Island was a civilian reactor, and Chernobyl primarily so, both being used for electrical power production. In contrast Windscale was for purely military purposes.
The reactors at Three Mile Island, unlike those at Windscale and Chernobyl, were in buildings designed to contain radioactive materials released by a reactor accident.
Other military reactors have produced immediate, known casualties such as the 1961 incident at the SL-1 plant in Idaho which killed three operators, or the criticality accident which killed Louis Slotin at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1946.
The accident at Windscale was also contemporary to the Kyshtym disaster, a more serious accident which happened on 29 September 1957 at the Mayak plant in the Soviet Union, when the failure of the cooling system for a tank storing tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste resulted in a non-nuclear explosion.
Read more about this topic: Windscale Fire
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