Tom Tuohy

May 8 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

WITH top gongs dished out to odd entertainers and dubious business folk, Tom Tuohy was a real hero, who never received any major official honour for averting a potentially horrific British nuclear disaster.

Tuohy, who has died, aged 90, acted selflessly to douse a reactor fire in the worst accident in British atomic history, in October, 1957, while deputy works manager at Windscale plutonium production plant (now Sellafield). A senior hands-on manager who led from the front, he modestly recalled last year: “I never thought about my own safety. There were things I could do, and I got on and did them.”

He started working in the atomic industry after the war as a health physics manager, at Springfields nuclear production plant, in Lancashire (to which he returned later as works manager), before moving to Windscale in the same role. When fire broke out at Pile 1, a primitive nuclear reactor on the site, he was recalled from leave, but various attempts to control the blaze failed. Dressed in full protective gear, Tuohy scaled the 80ft high reactor building and looked inside to see a “dull red lumi- nescence”. By October 11, only one very high risk option remained: pouring water on it. The fear was molten metal would oxidise the water, thereby freeing hydrogen to mix with air and cause a huge explosion. But with yellow and blue flames now spouting out of the reactor, water hoses poured water onto it for 30 hours.

Tuohy reascended the reactor building several times until he was satisfied that the fire was out. He said: “I did stand to one side, sort of hopefully, but if you’re staring straight at the core of a shut-down reactor you’re going to get quite a bit of radiation.”

Since then, it is believed that 240 people have died from cancers resulting from atmospheric radioactive releases, and millions of gallons of local milk were destroyed for a month afterwards. Five years earlier, Tuohy opened Sellafield’s separation plant and handled the first British-made plutonium, to be used for Pacific nuclear tests.

He was first managing director of British Nuclear Fuels in 1971, but retired early in 1974, unhappy about the industry’s future. He was married three times.

Tom Tuoy, CBE, nuclear chemist;born, November 7, 1917,died, March 12, 2008