Unseen World!

Written by Gerry Matlack

In the wake of World War 2 the United States government enacted legislation which prohibited any other nations from receiving the scientific bounty derived from the Manhattan Project. This meant that despite the participation of British scientists in the project, Britain recieved none of the benefits of the research. The year after the United States’ first successful nuclear bomb test in July of 1945, the British government decided that they too must develop a nuclear program in order to maintain their position as a world power. This pilot project eventually developed into the Windscale Nuclear plant.

In October 1957, after several years of successful operation, the workers at Windscale noticed some curious readings from their temperature monitoring equipment as they carried out standard maintenance. The reactor temperature was slowly rising during a time that they expected it to be falling. The remote detection equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, so two plant workers donned protective equipment and hiked to the reactor to inspect it in person. When they arrived, they were alarmed to discover that the interior of the uranium-filled reactor was ablaze.
Windscale’s two nuclear piles had been constructed in concrete buildings just outside of the small village of Seascale, Cumbria to produce Britain’s bounty of weapons-grade plutonium. The fission reactors had a straightforward air-cooled configuration which allowed each one to exhaust its excess heat through a tall chimney. Breeder reactors such as those at Windscale create plutonium by bombarding the most common isotope of uranium (uranium-238) with neutrons. Any uranium atoms which happen to absorb a neutron briefly become uranium-239, an unstable element which rapidly decays into neptunium-239. Having a half-life of only 2.355 days, this element also soon decays, resulting in the desired plutonium-239.

Each of the heavily shielded Windscale reactors was comprised of a stack of massive graphite bricks. A series of vertical boreholes through these blocks acted as channels for the reactor’s control rods which were used to absorb loose neutrons and thereby govern the fission rate. Hundreds of horizontal channels were carved into the blocks in a octagonal pattern for inserting canisters filled with whatever substances the scientists wished to bombard with neutrons. Many contained uranium to convert into plutonium, but others were special isotope cartridges for producing radioisotopes.

The canisters were pushed into place through the front of the reactor– known as the charge face– and once the neutrons had worked their magic and turned a good portion of the metallic uranium into plutonium, they were pushed out through the back into a water duct for cooling. The reactor itself was cooled by way of a fan-driven air duct which forced air over the reactor core and out the 400-foot-tall discharge stacks. As a last-minute modification, and at a great effort and expense, a filtering system was added to the top of each chimney at the insistence of a physicist named Sir John Cockcroft. These filters came to be known as “Cockcroft’s Folly” due to their engineering difficulty and questionable value.

It was not understood during the plant’s construction that graphite which is subjected to neutron bombardment has a tendency to store that energy within dislocations in its crystalline structure. This stored energy is called Wigner energy, named after physicist Eugene Wigner who discovered the effect during his own experiments. Left unchecked, graphite has a tendency to spontaneously release its accumulated Wigner energy in a powerful burst of heat. This was made apparent after two years of operation, at which time unexpected temperature increases were observed in the cores. On one occasion this occurred while the reactor was shut down.

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Written by Matt Castle

The passenger manifest for British South American Airlines (BSAA) flight CS-59 might have made a perfect character list for a murder-mystery. Aboard were two businessman friends touring South America on the lookout for trade opportunities: a fun-loving Swiss and a self-made English executive. Also travelling were a Palestinian man who was rumoured to have a diamond stitched into his jacket, and a South American agent of the Dunlop tyre company who had once been the tutor to Prince Michael of Romania. The oldest passenger was in her seventies, a widow of German extraction returning to her Chilean home after an inconvenient World War had unexpectedly extended her stay abroad. And to add a whiff of espionage, a member of a select corps of British civil servants known as King’s Messengers joined the flight, carrying a diplomatic bag bound for the UK embassy across the border.

The date was August 2nd, 1947, and the flight was scheduled to depart from Buenos Aires, Argentina, bound for Santiago, Chile. The intrepid voyagers were to fly in the Star Dust, a shiny Lancastrian aircraft derived from the legendary Avro Lancaster World War II bomber. Its aircrew were ex-Royal Air Force to a chap, and the machine was captained by an experienced and decorated wartime flyer named Reginald Cook. Traversing the Andes Mountains in atrocious winter weather was an undertaking that would demand all his knowledge and skills, yet the journey should have been well within the capabilities of both man and machine.
The dependable airliner could fly at speeds of 310 miles per hour and at altitudes of well over 20,000 feet— higher than most aircraft of the time and sufficient to clear the tallest peaks in the area. Reginald Cook had been recruited to the airline from the elite RAF Bomber Command Pathfinder Force, and like all BSAA pilots had received additional navigational training.

The crew maintained Morse-code radio contact with the ground for the duration of the flight, and just before it was scheduled to arrive they signalled their approach. But then a mysterious signal was received at Santiago airfield—comprising the letters “S-T-E-N-D-E-C”. Aware of no such Morse abbreviation, the radioman at Santiago requested a repeat of the signal, and the same cryptic message was received twice more. This inexplicable message was the last one received from flight CS-59; it answered subsequent signals with silence, and it never arrived at its destination. Mount TupungatoAn extensive aerial search was mounted, while the Chilean and Argentine armies combed the area on foot. No trace of Star Dust was found. For over fifty years the disappearance ranked as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and a lively and inventive mythology grew up around the incident.

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This article was written by Dan Gillis!

Residents from the town of Peshtigo attempt to escape the inferno.On October 8th, 1871, the small Wisconsin logging town of Peshtigo was consumed by one of the most severe and woefully under-reported fires in human history.

After a hot and dry year, with a mere two inches of rain falling from July through September, churchgoers were praying for much-needed precipitation. The creeks had dried up, and the Peshtigo River, which many residents relied upon for transportation and water, was dangerously low.

In the midst of that quiet Sunday evening, the tiny township was totally annihilated – charred by a gigantic fire that engulfed the buildings, the countryside, and even the townsfolk themselves. Even today the little-known blaze holds the distinction of being the deadliest fire ever to occur in the US.
More than 2,000 people were in the town on the morning of the fire. The population was swollen by crews of volunteers, enlisted to battle the sporadic wildfires that were scattered throughout the surrounding areas. The smoke from these fires hung in the air, making breathing difficult. Shortly after 8:30 pm, a dull roar caused alarm throughout the town. Flames from scattered wildfires had been whipped up into a blazing inferno by strong winds, placing a fire on a direct path towards Peshtigo. The firefighters and residents rushed to battle it with buckets of water, but quickly realized the gravity of the situation. They threw their buckets aside, headed to their homes to collect their families, and fled toward the relative safety of the Peshtigo River.

Soon a two-thousand degree Fahrenheit surge of flames overtook the small community. The extreme heat agitated the atmosphere into a flurry of superheated tornadoes and hurricane-force winds. A scorching hail of embers, white hot sand, and debris peppered the town. Rooftops were blown off of houses, and chimneys crumbled.