TON TRAIN STRUCK ITS TARGET. BUT HE WAS DELIGHTED WITH THE RESULT....

150-ton train struck its target. But he was delighted with the result. The impact was like a vast bass drum being sounded across the Leicestershire countryside. Then a flash of flame as the locomotive tossed the 50-tea flask aside and leapt over the deliberately derailed wagon that had carried it. But even though the flask lay on its side as to give the diesel’s protruding draw bar the best chance of prising the heavily-bolted lid open, the flask suffered only superficial damage. Sir Walter beamed as his engineers connected a pressure meter to the flask’s valve and registered a drop through the lid seals of only 0.29 of a pound from the original 100lb per square inch. Đề đề nghị của Bến Tre 5 “Even better than we expected," he said. "It shows that our calculations were ultra-cautious- which is what we have always known." Sir Walter openly acknowledged that this expensive crash test, spectacular though it was, was not conducted primarily as a scientific experiment. The 14-inch-thick forged steel walls of the flask were actually subjected to far more stress last March, when it was dropped from a crane onto concrete. Yesterday's spectacle-staged at a cost of £1.6 million- Sir Walter said, was to reassure people that the transport of irradiated nuclear power station fuel really was safe from road or rail accidents. The CEGB's complete four-year program of full-scale Magnox fuel flask testing is expected to cost £4 million. Now the board were considering whether to subject the same battered flask to a prolonged fire - another requirement of the international regulations governing nuclear fuel transport from power stations to reprocessing plants like Sellafield (formerly Windseale) in Cumbria. Locomotive 46009’s last run started eight miles back down the British Rail test track towards Nottingham, where a railwayman threw a small external switch to start her moving. At four miles she could have stopped by an automatic signal. One mile to go and she passed the point of no return. The crash was all over in perhaps five seconds, covered for another 10 seconds by the exploding locomotive smoke. When the whole train came to rest within about 100 yards, the three carriages were still more or less upright, though most of their wheels, like those of the locomotive, had been torn off. Only a few windows were smashed. Seats in the rear of two carriages were mostly still in place. It was not meant to be the railwaymen’s day, but they were quietly just as proud of the way their train had survived as the CEGB engineers were of how their nuclear flask had so passed its test. On this representative for the Welsh anti-nuclear campaign had the last word. Why he asks sarcastically at the press the briefing. If nuclear fuel was so safe on the railways, did the board hand it over to Sellafield where it seemed to be split into the Irish Sea? An irrelevant question, said the board’s spokesman.