Since the invention of nuclear weapons, there have been many nuclear accidents around the world. One particularly serious accident was the Windscale fire. The Windscale fire is considered the largest nuclear accident in UK history. It was classified as level five on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Quick action avoided most of the serious complications that could have arisen, but it still could have led to more than 200 cases of cancer. The accident occurred at a nuclear reactor facility located in Cumbria, England. This nuclear reactor facility had two gas-cooled nuclear reactors. The reactors were classified as breeder reactors and their purpose was to create a wealth of plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. This was achieved by flooding uranium-238 with neutrons. When one of these uranium-238 atoms absorbed a neutron, it became uranium-239. Uranium-239 is a very unstable element and it decays very quickly by beta emission into neptunium-239. Neptunium-239 is also a beta emitter and its half-life is very short, only 2.355 days. When Neptunium decays, it becomes the aforementioned plutonium (plutonium-239, to be exact). In Cumbria, these reactions took place inside huge nuclear reactors made of layers of graphite turned into bricks. A cooling system was in place, based on fans and using air to cool the reactor before it exited through a chimney. John Cockcroft, a noted physicist, insisted that filters be placed at the top of each of the chimneys. Because this was very expensive and considered superfluous, the filters were referred to as "Cockfort's madness". Two years after the Windscale plant was built, scientists worked...... middle of paper ......that something had gone wrong when some of their temperature monitors showed that the temperature in the core increased instead of decreasing. Operators had difficulty examining the pile due to faulty monitoring equipment. Finally, Tom Hughes, the deputy director, went to inspect the reactor wearing thick protective clothing. He saw that the fuel was burning a bright red. At this point, the reactor had already been on fire for almost forty-eight hours. The situation was described as an emergency. Operators did not know how to deal with this unprecedented disaster. They tried to put out the fire using cooling fans, extracting the fuel canisters, and then using tons of liquid carbon dioxide, but none of these methods worked. Conversely, cooling fans and carbon dioxide methods provided the fire with extra oxygen to use as fuel..