And there I was thinking Windscale was the dumbest reactor design ever built.

I had never heard of this.

"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."

Pretty amazing, right? A nuclear reactor built more or less like a bonfire. And apparently nobody thought this was a bad idea.

But of course, leave it to the Soviets to come up with something far crazier and far worse.

Well, that's just fooking great...