Windscale Fire 1957

It was Britain’s worst nuclear disaster, but it is likely you have never heard of it. Unlike Chernobyl in Ukraine, or Fukishima in Japan, Windscale in Cumbria is not vivid in the public imagination. And that is because the full extent of the fire that broke out in 1957 at the nuclear site now known as Sellafield was covered up by the government, even though it lead to dozens of cases of cancer. Atomfall, a video game released late last month, sets users in an imagined post-apocalyptic version of Cumbria, a world where the Windscale fire has turned much of northern England into a lawless quarantine zone. But the real thing could have been so much worse. One local union leader went as far as saying that the consequences could have been as bad as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, had efforts to put water on the blaze backfired.