Vic Goodwin, a graduate trainee at Windscale in 1957, went to work early on October 10 because a colleague was sick. It was the start of a long shift.

Now aged 75 and retired, Mr Goodwin can recall in meticulous detail the events of those two extraordinary days and how he laboured alongside a small band of fellow technicians to stave off catastrophe. The physicist wears his courage lightly.

He and his colleagues on the charge face knew something “very odd” was happening at about midday when radiation was registered in the filters of the chimney. He remembers informing the pile manager that they had suffered a “bad burst”, a term used to describe uranium in a fuel rod oxidising and releasing radiation.

Mr Goodwin, who helped to locate the site of the overheating in the reactor, said it soon became clear that the situation was serious. When staff withdrew the charge plugs, they could see that the fuel was glowing red hot. Two teams of four began ejecting hundreds of fuel rods to cool the system and isolate the fire. Normally, this was a crude but not physically draining experience, Mr Goodwin said. “Clearly under these circumstances things were not normal. The fuel elements were hot enough to jam and were riding over each other.” The rods were usually ejected manually by technicians pushing aluminium poles with a clamp on the end. It is part of the story that as the heat rose the team used sledgehammers and pieces of scaffolding to manoeuvre the rods.“People extemporised. I seem to recall an electrical conduit pipe was used to exert rather more force. There may have been some hammering, but I do not recall,” Mr Goodwin said.

“I was galloping between the control room to the pile cap, to look down the inspection holes, to the charge face, to try to establish what was happening with the temperatures getting higher. You must remember there was no central point at which all the necessary information was available. It became fairly obvious that the fire-break wasn’t working. By around 8pm we could see flames coming from the back of the core. It became a matter of getting enough men and enough movement of fuel out of the core and into the canal at the back and into the pond as quickly as possible.”

Mr Goodwin recalls a number of hurried discussions. Nothing like this had happened before. The possibility of using an inert gas was discussed but discarded. Time was wasted hauling a supply of CO2 from nearby Calder Hall. It did not work. By this time Mr Goodwin remembers a “chappie from the lab” intoning lugubriously about the steadily rising temperature. It was not until about nine o’clock the next morning that it was decided to inject water directly into the core.

It did not occur to the young trainee, fresh from National Service, to be scared. He was too busy getting on with his job. “It was something riskier than normal but not outrageously so,” he said, adding casually that “bits of burnt fuel element were blowing back out”. He insisted that he was never concerned about radioactivity. “One of the things that impressed me on going into the nuclear industry was the care taken monitoring the amount of radiation we received on site, which was much lower than people like radiographers in hospitals and not much higher than children X-rayed during the tuberculosis eradication campaign.

“I could imagine that there may have been people who were not informed about what was going on. They were told that Friday morning to keep the windows shut and keep their heads down. In those circumstances people could become worried.”

Mr Goodwin went on to enjoy a varied career in the nuclear industry before returning to Cumbria in retirement. He remains convinced that nuclear should be part of a sensible energy mix, even if electricity has to be imported from France.

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