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Top Stories for the month of October, 1957:
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October 4 - In the real world this is the launch date for Sputnik, man's first artificial satellite.
October 4 - Ottawa (INN)
Today the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow was displayed for the first time to the media. The Arrow is a delta-winged interceptor aircraft, designed and built by Avro Aircraft Limited in Malton, Ontario, Canada, as the culmination of a design study that began in 1953. Considered to be both an advanced technical and aerodynamic achievement for the Canadian aviation industry, the CF-105 holds the promise of Mach 2 speeds at altitudes exceeding 50,000 ft, and is intended to serve as the Royal Canadian Air Force's - RCAF - primary interceptor in the 1960's and beyond.
October 10 - Washington (INN)
Today U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower apologized to Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, the Minister for Finance in the Nkrumah government in Ghana, after he was refused service in a Howard Johnson's restaurant in Dover, Delaware. He is reported to have told the staff: "The people here are of a lower social status than I am but they can drink here and we can't. You can keep the orange juice and the change, but this is not the last you have heard of this." Some sources suspect that the incident, which resulted in some publicity, may have been engineered by Gbedemah's secretary. None-the-less, it resulted in Gbedemah being invited to breakfast at the White House.
October 10 - London (INN)
Today a fire at the Windscale power station in the UK has released radioactive material into the surrounding environment, including Iodine-131.
In order for Britain to engage in a nuclear weapons treaty with the US, it had to demonstrate that it was a technological equal. The Windscale facility was built to produce plutonium for the British atom bomb. After the successful explosion of the atom bomb, the US designed and exploded a thermonuclear bomb requiring tritium. Britain did not have any facility to produce tritium and decided to use the Windscale piles.
Tritium can be produced in nuclear reactors by neutron activation of lithium-6. Higher neutron fluxes were needed for this rather than for producing plutonium and it was decided to reduce the size of the cooling fins, totalling approximately 500,000 individual fins, on the aluminium fuel cartridges, thereby reducing the absorption of neutrons by this aluminium.
By pushing the first-generation design of the Windscale facility beyond its intended limits, tritium could be produced at the cost of a reduced safety factor. After a first successful production run of tritium in Pile 1, the heat problem was presumed to be negligible and full-scale production began, but by raising the temperature of the reactor beyond the design specifications, the scientists had altered the normal distribution of heat in the core, causing "hot spots" to develop in Pile 1. These spikes of heat went unnoticed by the scientists because the thermocouples used to measure the core temperatures were positioned based on the original heat distribution design and were not measuring the hottest parts of the reactor, leading to the falsely optimistic readings.
On the 7th of October, operators began an annealing cycle for Windscale Pile 1 by switching the cooling fans to low power and stabilizing the reactor at low power. The next day, to carry out the annealing, the operators increased the power to the reactor. When it appeared that the annealing process was taking place, control rods were lowered back into the core to shut down the reactor, but it soon became apparent that the Wigner energy release was not spreading through the core, but dwindling prematurely.
The operators withdrew the control rods again to apply a second nuclear heating and complete the annealing process. Because some thermocouples were not in the hottest parts of the core, the operators were not aware that some areas were considerably hotter than others. This, and the second heating, are suspected of having been the deciding factors behind the fire, although the precise cause remains unknown.
Early in the morning on the 10th of October, it was suspected that something unusual was going on. The temperature in the core was supposed to gradually fall as the Wigner release ended, but the monitoring equipment showed something more ambiguous and one thermocouple indicated that the core temperature was instead rising.
In an effort to help cool the pile, the airflow was increased. This fed more oxygen to the fire and lifted radioactive materials up the chimney and into the filter galleries. It was then that workers in the control room realised that the radiation monitoring devices which measured activity at the top of the discharge stack were at full scale reading. In accordance with written guidelines, the foreman declared a site emergency.
The operators tried to examine the pile with a remote scanner but it had jammed. Tom Hughes, second in command to the Reactor Manager, suggested examining the reactor personally and so he and another operator went to the charge face of the reactor, clad in protective gear. A fuel channel inspection plug was taken out close to a thermocouple registering high temperatures and it was then that the operators saw that the fuel was red hot.
"An inspection plug was taken out," said Tom Hughes in a later interview, "and we saw, to our complete horror, four channels of fuel glowing bright cherry red."
There was no doubt that the reactor was now on fire, and had been for almost 48 hours. Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy donned full protective equipment and breathing apparatus and scaled the 80 feet to the top of the reactor building, where he stood atop the reactor lid to examine the rear of the reactor, the discharge face. Here he reported a dull red luminescence visible, lighting up the void between the back of the reactor and the rear containment.
Red hot fuel cartridges were glowing in the fuel channels on the discharge face. He returned to the reactor upper containment several times throughout the incident, at the height of which a fierce conflagration was raging from the discharge face and playing on the back of the reinforced concrete containment — concrete whose specifications required that it be kept below a certain temperature to prevent its disintegration and collapse.
The operators were unsure what to do about the fire. First, they tried to blow the flames out by putting the fans onto full power and increasing the cooling, but this only fanned the flames. Tom Hughes and his colleague had already created a fire break by ejecting some undamaged fuel cartridges from around the blaze and Tom Tuohy suggested trying to eject some from the heart of the fire, by bludgeoning the melted cartridges through the reactor and into the cooling pond behind it with scaffolding poles.
This proved impossible and the fuel rods refused to budge, no matter how much force was applied. The poles were withdrawn with their ends red hot and, once, a pole was returned red hot and dripping with molten metal. Hughes knew this had to be molten irradiated uranium and this caused serious radiation problems on the charge hoist itself.
"It - the exposed fuel channel - was white hot," said Hughes' colleague on the charge hoist with him, "it was just white hot. Nobody, I mean, nobody, can believe how hot it could possibly be."
Next, the operators tried to extinguish the fire using carbon dioxide. The new gas-cooled Calder Hall reactors on the site had just received a delivery of 25 tons of liquid carbon dioxide and this was rigged up to the charge face of Windscale Pile 1, but there were problems getting it to the fire in useful quantities. The fire was so hot that it stripped the oxygen from what carbon dioxide could be applied.
"So we got this rigged up," Hughes recounted, "and we had this poor little tube of carbon dioxide and I had absolutely no hope it was going to work."
On the morning of Friday 11 October, when the fire was at its worst, eleven tons of uranium were ablaze. Temperatures were becoming extreme, one thermocouple registered 1,300°C, and the biological shield around the stricken reactor was now in severe danger of collapse. Faced with this crisis, the operators decided to use water. This was risky, as molten metal oxidises in contact with water, stripping oxygen from the water molecules and leaving free hydrogen, which could mix with incoming air and explode, tearing open the weakened containment.
Faced with a lack of other options, the operators decided to go ahead with the plan. About a dozen fire hoses were hauled to the charge face of the reactor; their nozzles were cut off and the lines themselves connected to scaffolding poles and fed into fuel channels about a metre above the heart of the fire. Tuohy once again hauled himself atop the reactor shielding and ordered the water to be turned on, listening carefully at the inspection holes for any sign of a hydrogen reaction as the pressure was increased. However the water was unsuccessful in extinguishing the fire, requiring further measures to be taken.
Tom Tuohy then ordered everyone out of the reactor building except himself and the Fire Chief in order to shut off all cooling and ventilating air entering the reactor. Tuohy then climbed up several times and reported watching the flames leaping from the discharge face slowly dying away. During one of the inspections, he found that the inspection plates, which were removed with a metal hook to facilitate viewing of the discharge face of the core, were stuck fast. This, he reported, was due to the fire trying to suck air in from wherever it could.
"I have no doubt it was even sucking air in through the chimney at this point to try and maintain itself," he remarked in an interview.
Finally he managed to pull the inspection plate away and was greeted with the sight of the fire dying away.
"First the flames went, then the flames reduced and the glow began to die down," he described, "I went up to check several times until I was satisfied that the fire was out. I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully," he went on to say, "but if you're staring straight at the core of a shut down reactor you're going to get quite a bit of radiation."
Water was kept flowing through the pile for a further 24 hours until it was completely cold.
The reactor tank itself has remained sealed since the accident and still contains about 15 tons of uranium fuel. It was thought that the remaining fuel could still reignite if disturbed, due to the presence of pyrophoric uranium hydride formed in the original water dousing. The pile is not scheduled for final decommissioning until 2037.
There was a release of radioactive material that spread across the UK and Europe. The fire released an estimated 740 terabecquerels - 20,000 curies - of iodine-131, as well as 22 TBq - 594 curies - of caesium-137 and 12,000 TBq - 324,000 curies - of xenon-133, amongst other radionuclides.
October 11 - London (INN)
The Jodrell Bank Observatory, a British observatory that hosts a number of telescopes, Today announced the opening of the largest radio telescope in the world. The Radio Telescope at Jodrell Observatory measures 250 feet in diameter, and as such is the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. The telescope is located near Goostrey, Cheshire in the north-west of England and is part of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester.
The observatory was established in 1945 by Sir Bernard Lovell, who wanted to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar during the Second World War. It has since played an important role in the research of meteors, quasars, pulsars, masers and gravitational lenses, and iss heavily involved with the tracking of space probes.
October 23 – Madrid (Inn)
Today Morocco began an invasion of Ifni, a Spanish Colony. Violent demonstrations against foreign rule erupted in Ifni on April 10, followed by civil strife and the widespread murder of those loyal to Spain. In response, Generalissimo Franco has dispatched two battalions of the Spanish Legion, Spain's elite fighting force, to El Aaiún in June.
Spanish military mobilization resulted in the Moroccan army converging near Ifni. On October 23rd, two villages on the outskirts of Sidi Ifni, Goulimine and Bou Izarguen, were occupied by 1,500 Moroccan soldiers.
We will be keeping a close eye on this ongoing crisis.
October 25 – Washington (INN)
Albert Anastasia, born Umberto Anastasio, September 26, 1902 – October 25, 1957, was one of the most ruthless and feared Cosa Nostra mobsters in American history. A founder of the American Mafia, Anastasia ran Murder, Inc. during the prewar era and was boss of the Gambino crime family during most of the 1950s. Anastasia died today in what is probably the most sensational assassination in mob history to date.
On the morning of October 25, Anastasia entered the barber shop of the Park Sheraton Hotel at 870 7th Avenue, on 56th Street and 7th Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. Anastasia's bodyguard parked the car in an underground garage and then took a walk outside, leaving Anastasia unprotected. As Anastasia relaxed in the barber chair, two men, with scarves covering their faces, rushed in, shoved the barber out of the way, and fired at Anastasia. After the first volley of bullets, Anastasia allegedly lunged at his killers. However, the stunned Anastasia had actually attacked the gunmen's reflections in the wall mirror of the barber shop. The gunmen continued firing and Albert Anastasia finally fell to the floor, dead.
The Anastasia murder has generated a tremendous amount of public interest and has sparked a high profile police investigation. Per New York Times journalist Selwyn Raab, "The vivid image of a helpless victim swathed in white towels was stamped in the public memory." However, so far nobody has been charged in this case. As of now the leading police theories on who killed Anastasia has centered on Profaci crime family mobster Joe Gallo, the Patriarca crime family of Providence, Rhode Island, and certain drug dealers with the Gambino family.
The Profaci theory is that Genovese gave the Anastasia murder contract to Joe Profaci, who passed it on to mobster "Crazy Joe" Gallo. Gallo then performed the assassination with some of his crewmembers. At one point, Gallo boasted to an associate: "You can just call the five of us the barbershop quintet."
However, detractors say that it is illogical for Profaci to kill Anastasia. Profaci was allied with Bonanno and Anastasia on the Commission against Genovese, Costello, and Thomas Lucchese. By killing Anastasia, Profaci was eliminating an ally and gaining a potential enemy in Gambino.
The Patriarca theory is that Anastasia's killers came from the Patriarca Family in Providence / Boston. Genovese had traditionally strong ties to Patriarca boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca. In addition, it made sense to use out-of-town hitters. The Patriarca hit team was allegedly led by mobster John (Jackie) "Mad Dog" Nazarian.
The drug dealers theory is that Gambino used some Gambino drug dealers from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to kill Anastasia, including Stephen Armone, Steven Grammauta, and Arnold Wittenberg.
David Richlen, International News Network
International Desk