On 10 October 1957, an undetermined amount of contamination got released into the air after the graphite core of Britain’s first nuclear reactor, a site at Windscale, Cumberland, caught fire. The incident, known as the Windscale fire, was the worst nuclear accident in England’s history. Five decades later, medical researchers reported mortality and cancer rates for workers involved in the 1957 fire “does not reveal any measurable effect of the fire upon their health.” (You can read the report of a British board of inquiry into the accident here (). The former Windscale power station was shut down and decommissioned.