9 ms·

Making 'The Blue Flash': How I reconstructed a fatal atomic accident

92 points by Hooke 3y ago

xeromal 3y ago
You can see this in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY
- dylan604 3y ago
  I love the "draw chalk outlines around your feet so I can work on if you're going to die or not since we know I am" moment.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    Fabricated though, like the falling cup. The story as told by Schreiber in his memo on the accident is here: https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin
    - dylan604 3y ago
      What? You mean that the producers of a film used creative licensing to tell a story of a “based on actual events” event is not 100% exactly what happened because what happened is really boring so they spiced it up a bit? You want to nit pick that the telling of the story has been tweaked, but you totally let the fact the actual incident didn’t happen until well after Fat Man and Little Boy had both already been dropped and the war was over, so the incident had nothing to do with the Trinity Test?
      - mustacheemperor 3y ago
        Golly, that is a lot of hostility. I know how movies work, and just thought you and other readers may be interested in reading the non-dramatized retelling, having read it for the first time myself earlier in the day. FWIW, I didn’t think it was really boring, I thought it was interesting, especially to compare to the film retelling, hence why I shared it here. Wowee.
        dylan604 3y ago
        Wowee? Hostility? Your fact check got fact checked. You come out like your clearing the story, but you only told part of the story that was convenient to your narrative. You took some creative licensing just like you’re critiquing someone else’s decisions.
        mustacheemperor 3y ago
        My "narrative?" Holy cow, I have no idea what your problem is. Your reaction is unreasonable and I have to assume doesn't actually have much to do with what I posted. You are quite apparently reading an attitude into my post that I absolutely did not write into it. My sharing the true story behind a fictionalized retelling you enjoy was not meant as an attack on you or a smarmy "fact check," it was just to share the true story in context to the retelling. I read HN for intellectual curiosity and that's why I post things here too. This isn't the comment section on some politics website. By the way, HN's community guidelines: >Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. You have assumed bad faith and are swiping at me as you cross-examine your theory of why I "really" posted what I did, which is wrong. That's why I didn't break down the entirety of the movie's correspondence to reality, because you are imagining, and insisting, I was doing something here that I am not. ** edited out the rest because I won't argue about whether I was trying to pick an argument either. Take my word for it, you are completely wrong in your characterization of why I conversed with you with something I thought was of mutual interest. Good luck to you.
User23 3y ago
The infamous Demon Core[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  They didn't show that in Oppenheimer.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I thought this to myself as well after seeing Oppenheimer. As someone else has mentioned, it was shown in Fat Man, Little Boy. Each movie had different things that were or were not shown. FMLB didn't have the football field. There's only so much you can put into a 3 hour film where at least 7/8ths are in focus. Edit: Diving down a rabbit hole, it looks like the scene in FMLB was based on the Louis Slotin incident from May 21, 1946. So some creative licensing from the producers, and probably why it is not in Oppenheimer
    - jprd 3y ago
      I wish I had something witty to add here, other than - "LOL". Thank you!
      - dylan604 3y ago
        There's a saying in the camera department where the AC wants to buy a stop from the DP. I have always wanted to use that line, but I've never had a DP shoot that shallow for those kinds of scenes. In music videos, sure, but man! I haven't had the time to look into what was used to shoot that, but I'm wondering if they were shooting T-.95 it was so shallow.
  - User23 3y ago
    What’s really interesting is how young everyone involved was.
    - 3y ago
michaelcampbell 3y ago
https://archive.is/2Dqxj https://archive.is/2Dqxj
toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin
- dang 3y ago
  Related: A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 - July 2023 (1 comment) The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 - May 2023 (59 comments) The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 - Dec 2020 (1 comment) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 - Aug 2019 (22 comments) Demon Core - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 - June 2019 (55 comments) The blue flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 - May 2016 (1 comment) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Physicist Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 - May 2016 (34 comments)
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    "A careless slip" is really understating it. "A completely irresponsible and reckless indifference to safety" would be more like it.
    - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
      If you want to look at it with 21st century eyes, sure. Things were VERY different back then though. What you would call prudent and common sense safety measures, they would have called something that you would think they should be fired for saying. And the boss would have sided with them.
      - 3y ago
userbinator 3y ago
Looking at how they worked with radioactive materials back then, it feels rather amazing that we're still here today. I guess articles like these are starting to pop up as we approach August 6...
- flangola7 3y ago
  What is August 6?
  - _trampeltier 3y ago
    The US throw nukes on Japan. August 6. Hiroshima and three days later, August 9. Nagasaki.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
  - GolDDranks 3y ago
    The day of the Hiroshima bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Ceremony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Cerem...
- ck2 3y ago
  Don't forget there are "lost" nuclear bombs all over the world including North Carolina. "oh well we can't find it, we're got plenty more anyway, what's the worst that could happen someday when everyone forgets it's there" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear-bombs-that-no-one-can-find https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear... > a B-52 broke up while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two nuclear weapons to the ground. One was relatively undamaged after its parachute deployed successfully, but a later examination revealed that three out of four safeguards had failed
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    > a B-52 broke up while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two nuclear weapons to the ground. One was relatively undamaged after its parachute deployed successfully, but a later examination revealed that three out of four safeguards had failed Okay, that's scary. I can just imagine someone looking to improve efficiency or cost savings thinking that four safeguards is over-engineered.
MarkMarine 3y ago
I’ve read about this incident before, what I don’t understand is the parameters of the experiment. What were they trying to learn? Why re-do it multiple times? How could this get to the point where this guy was just holding a screwdriver and plopping the beryllium cap onto this core, after a different but similar experiment with beryllium bricks enclosing one of these plutonium cores also killed someone as it started to go critical… doesn’t that prove the point that yes, it will go critical?
- Doxin 3y ago
  As far as I understand it, it was initially an experiment to determine some figures around when things go critical. Then it turned into a demonstration. Then it turned into a party trick.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  I have been curious about that as well, as there does not appear to be anything precise about what Slotin was doing. The impression I have from what I have read so far was that he was still in the set-up stage of the experiment, which required an assembly that was close to criticality, and I'm guessing that, once that had been achieved, that actual experiment would be conducted with much greater precision. In this case, he was merely demonstrating the procedure to Alvin Graves, who was to take over Slotin's work, so there may have been no intention of making precise measurements. Raemer Schreiber, who was present in the lab working on something else, wrote "At first Slotin said that he didn't have the proper materials for one. Then he remembered that we had the 49 cores there so he said he would do one 'in about two minutes' in a beryllium tamper after we (Schreiber and Perlman) had finished our counts. I remarked that if he were going to do it in two minutes I was going to leave but would stick around if he took a half hour for it. This was not intended seriously since we all had confidence in Slotin's ability and judgment." In the context of what else I have read about the experiment, I think the "about two minutes" comment referred to how long it would take for Slotin to set up for the experiment. He also wrote "I had assumed that the approach to critical would be rather slow so continued to work on the initiator, thinking that when the multiplication got to an interesting point I would turn and watch." A near- but sub-critical assembly serves as a multiplier (amplifier) of any neutron flux it is exposed to, with the gain asymptotically approaching infinity as the assembly approaches criticality. Again according to Schreiber, Slotin was using a neutron-producing "driving source", and my guess is that setting up for the experiment involved adjusting the assembly until it was producing a sufficiently large multiplication of the driver's neutron flux. As to why this experiment had to be repeated, I get the impression that, at this stage, each bomb was custom-built (or at least the ones for the Bikini tests were), and its fissile core and the surrounding tamper had to be individually calibrated and adjusted. Beyond the description of what Slotin was doing at the time of the accident, I have not seen any description of how the experiment was performed in terms of what measurements were taken, or of its precise purpose. https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin - thanks to toomuchtodo for the reference.
dale_glass 3y ago
I'm still confused about what was actually being done and why. Like what's the purpose of this experiment? What are the outputs, what does a successful result look like and what does a failure look like? So I take it that positioning the reflector over the plutonium core generates more or less output from the sphere. Was somebody measuring that? But if so surely the actual precise distances involved are important? So if the point is "how close do we have to get to get to X output", then surely distance measuring is of critical importance, and a screwdriver is completely unsuitable for that task. Now I get it was a demonstration, so the actual data output may not have been important. But still, the person you're teaching needs the actual useful results when they do the experiment for real, so surely they will need something other than a screwdriver?
- poulpy123 3y ago
  The author is an author and an artist who wrote and illustrated an article about the accident. The goal of the reconstruction he has done is to provide realistic drawing models
  - jefftk 3y ago
    dale_glass is asking what goal Slotin had in 1946, not what goal Platts-Mills had today.
    - poulpy123 3y ago
      oh my bad
tetrep 3y ago
I don't want to cry clickbait, but I really thought radioactive material was going to be involved here. Like, setup the accident again with a machine handling the screwdriver. I was very dissapointed to read about an artist's rendition of the accident. As you can see in other comments, this is a very interesting topic! I think that the shared article adds relativley little, though.
- NamTaf 3y ago
  ...you thought someone was going to be able to get a critical amount of fissile material (originally plutonium) and bring it together using a machine??? I cannot possibly express how thankful I am that doing so is just about impossible for any layman.
  - svrtknst 3y ago
    Famously, they tried to recreate it once. And slipped. And people died
  - tetrep 3y ago
    What about the title implies only laymen were involved? I had no idea going into it who would be doing what.
    - justin66 3y ago
      You thought nuclear security professionals were going to recreate an incredibly expensive nuclear disaster which killed a guy, except actuated by a machine with the humans at a safe distance? And that would have been more educational than just building a model of the thing with a painted foam core?
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Journalists -and scientists for that matter - don't usually have access to highly enriched fissile material. Nobody would get permission to do this without a very, very good reason.
eprparadox 3y ago
[repost] i was fascinated with the criticality accident that claimed Slotin's life when i first learned about it. in particular, the schematic estimating everyone's distance to the apparatus and how much radiation they may have been exposed to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Slotin_criticality_map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti... there was a second sketch made from that drawing which i also found fascinating. it doesn't add any additional information or analytical ability, but is just a sort of interesting and slightly dark translation of a rote schematic diagram into an artistic rendering of the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Slotin_criticality_drawing.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti... I searched around for awhile trying to find the purpose and/or author of that second sketch but to no avail. however i did use it as the cover for an EP i released. please enjoy! https://open.spotify.com/artist/37U37SYaXf1varqMgmpHkc?si=zEBqJ0GqTG6jOEqb9tI-Nw&nd=1 https://open.spotify.com/artist/37U37SYaXf1varqMgmpHkc?si=zE...

92 points by Hooke 3y ago

You can see this in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY

dylan604 3y ago
I love the "draw chalk outlines around your feet so I can work on if you're going to die or not since we know I am" moment.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  Fabricated though, like the falling cup. The story as told by Schreiber in his memo on the accident is here: https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin
  - dylan604 3y ago
    What? You mean that the producers of a film used creative licensing to tell a story of a “based on actual events” event is not 100% exactly what happened because what happened is really boring so they spiced it up a bit? You want to nit pick that the telling of the story has been tweaked, but you totally let the fact the actual incident didn’t happen until well after Fat Man and Little Boy had both already been dropped and the war was over, so the incident had nothing to do with the Trinity Test?
    - mustacheemperor 3y ago
      Golly, that is a lot of hostility. I know how movies work, and just thought you and other readers may be interested in reading the non-dramatized retelling, having read it for the first time myself earlier in the day. FWIW, I didn’t think it was really boring, I thought it was interesting, especially to compare to the film retelling, hence why I shared it here. Wowee.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        Wowee? Hostility? Your fact check got fact checked. You come out like your clearing the story, but you only told part of the story that was convenient to your narrative. You took some creative licensing just like you’re critiquing someone else’s decisions.
        mustacheemperor 3y ago
        My "narrative?" Holy cow, I have no idea what your problem is. Your reaction is unreasonable and I have to assume doesn't actually have much to do with what I posted. You are quite apparently reading an attitude into my post that I absolutely did not write into it. My sharing the true story behind a fictionalized retelling you enjoy was not meant as an attack on you or a smarmy "fact check," it was just to share the true story in context to the retelling. I read HN for intellectual curiosity and that's why I post things here too. This isn't the comment section on some politics website. By the way, HN's community guidelines: >Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. You have assumed bad faith and are swiping at me as you cross-examine your theory of why I "really" posted what I did, which is wrong. That's why I didn't break down the entirety of the movie's correspondence to reality, because you are imagining, and insisting, I was doing something here that I am not. ** edited out the rest because I won't argue about whether I was trying to pick an argument either. Take my word for it, you are completely wrong in your characterization of why I conversed with you with something I thought was of mutual interest. Good luck to you.

User23 3y ago

The infamous Demon Core[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
They didn't show that in Oppenheimer.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I thought this to myself as well after seeing Oppenheimer. As someone else has mentioned, it was shown in Fat Man, Little Boy. Each movie had different things that were or were not shown. FMLB didn't have the football field. There's only so much you can put into a 3 hour film where at least 7/8ths are in focus. Edit: Diving down a rabbit hole, it looks like the scene in FMLB was based on the Louis Slotin incident from May 21, 1946. So some creative licensing from the producers, and probably why it is not in Oppenheimer
  - jprd 3y ago
    I wish I had something witty to add here, other than - "LOL". Thank you!
    - dylan604 3y ago
      There's a saying in the camera department where the AC wants to buy a stop from the DP. I have always wanted to use that line, but I've never had a DP shoot that shallow for those kinds of scenes. In music videos, sure, but man! I haven't had the time to look into what was used to shoot that, but I'm wondering if they were shooting T-.95 it was so shallow.
- User23 3y ago
  What’s really interesting is how young everyone involved was.
  - 3y ago

michaelcampbell 3y ago

https://archive.is/2Dqxj https://archive.is/2Dqxj

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin

dang 3y ago
Related: A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 - July 2023 (1 comment) The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 - May 2023 (59 comments) The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 - Dec 2020 (1 comment) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 - Aug 2019 (22 comments) Demon Core - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 - June 2019 (55 comments) The blue flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 - May 2016 (1 comment) Demon Core: The Strange Death of Physicist Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 - May 2016 (34 comments)
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  "A careless slip" is really understating it. "A completely irresponsible and reckless indifference to safety" would be more like it.
  - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
    If you want to look at it with 21st century eyes, sure. Things were VERY different back then though. What you would call prudent and common sense safety measures, they would have called something that you would think they should be fired for saying. And the boss would have sided with them.
    - 3y ago

userbinator 3y ago

Looking at how they worked with radioactive materials back then, it feels rather amazing that we're still here today. I guess articles like these are starting to pop up as we approach August 6...

flangola7 3y ago
What is August 6?
- _trampeltier 3y ago
  The US throw nukes on Japan. August 6. Hiroshima and three days later, August 9. Nagasaki.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  The anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
- GolDDranks 3y ago
  The day of the Hiroshima bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Ceremony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Cerem...
ck2 3y ago
Don't forget there are "lost" nuclear bombs all over the world including North Carolina. "oh well we can't find it, we're got plenty more anyway, what's the worst that could happen someday when everyone forgets it's there" https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear-bombs-that-no-one-can-find https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear... > a B-52 broke up while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two nuclear weapons to the ground. One was relatively undamaged after its parachute deployed successfully, but a later examination revealed that three out of four safeguards had failed
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > a B-52 broke up while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina, dropping two nuclear weapons to the ground. One was relatively undamaged after its parachute deployed successfully, but a later examination revealed that three out of four safeguards had failed Okay, that's scary. I can just imagine someone looking to improve efficiency or cost savings thinking that four safeguards is over-engineered.

MarkMarine 3y ago

I’ve read about this incident before, what I don’t understand is the parameters of the experiment. What were they trying to learn? Why re-do it multiple times? How could this get to the point where this guy was just holding a screwdriver and plopping the beryllium cap onto this core, after a different but similar experiment with beryllium bricks enclosing one of these plutonium cores also killed someone as it started to go critical… doesn’t that prove the point that yes, it will go critical?

Doxin 3y ago
As far as I understand it, it was initially an experiment to determine some figures around when things go critical. Then it turned into a demonstration. Then it turned into a party trick.
mannykannot 3y ago
I have been curious about that as well, as there does not appear to be anything precise about what Slotin was doing. The impression I have from what I have read so far was that he was still in the set-up stage of the experiment, which required an assembly that was close to criticality, and I'm guessing that, once that had been achieved, that actual experiment would be conducted with much greater precision. In this case, he was merely demonstrating the procedure to Alvin Graves, who was to take over Slotin's work, so there may have been no intention of making precise measurements. Raemer Schreiber, who was present in the lab working on something else, wrote "At first Slotin said that he didn't have the proper materials for one. Then he remembered that we had the 49 cores there so he said he would do one 'in about two minutes' in a beryllium tamper after we (Schreiber and Perlman) had finished our counts. I remarked that if he were going to do it in two minutes I was going to leave but would stick around if he took a half hour for it. This was not intended seriously since we all had confidence in Slotin's ability and judgment." In the context of what else I have read about the experiment, I think the "about two minutes" comment referred to how long it would take for Slotin to set up for the experiment. He also wrote "I had assumed that the approach to critical would be rather slow so continued to work on the initiator, thinking that when the multiplication got to an interesting point I would turn and watch." A near- but sub-critical assembly serves as a multiplier (amplifier) of any neutron flux it is exposed to, with the gain asymptotically approaching infinity as the assembly approaches criticality. Again according to Schreiber, Slotin was using a neutron-producing "driving source", and my guess is that setting up for the experiment involved adjusting the assembly until it was producing a sufficiently large multiplication of the driver's neutron flux. As to why this experiment had to be repeated, I get the impression that, at this stage, each bomb was custom-built (or at least the ones for the Bikini tests were), and its fissile core and the surrounding tamper had to be individually calibrated and adjusted. Beyond the description of what Slotin was doing at the time of the accident, I have not seen any description of how the experiment was performed in terms of what measurements were taken, or of its precise purpose. https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin https://www.halflifeofgenius.com/slotin - thanks to toomuchtodo for the reference.

dale_glass 3y ago

I'm still confused about what was actually being done and why. Like what's the purpose of this experiment? What are the outputs, what does a successful result look like and what does a failure look like? So I take it that positioning the reflector over the plutonium core generates more or less output from the sphere. Was somebody measuring that? But if so surely the actual precise distances involved are important? So if the point is "how close do we have to get to get to X output", then surely distance measuring is of critical importance, and a screwdriver is completely unsuitable for that task. Now I get it was a demonstration, so the actual data output may not have been important. But still, the person you're teaching needs the actual useful results when they do the experiment for real, so surely they will need something other than a screwdriver?

poulpy123 3y ago
The author is an author and an artist who wrote and illustrated an article about the accident. The goal of the reconstruction he has done is to provide realistic drawing models
- jefftk 3y ago
  dale_glass is asking what goal Slotin had in 1946, not what goal Platts-Mills had today.
  - poulpy123 3y ago
    oh my bad

tetrep 3y ago

I don't want to cry clickbait, but I really thought radioactive material was going to be involved here. Like, setup the accident again with a machine handling the screwdriver. I was very dissapointed to read about an artist's rendition of the accident. As you can see in other comments, this is a very interesting topic! I think that the shared article adds relativley little, though.

NamTaf 3y ago
...you thought someone was going to be able to get a critical amount of fissile material (originally plutonium) and bring it together using a machine??? I cannot possibly express how thankful I am that doing so is just about impossible for any layman.
- svrtknst 3y ago
  Famously, they tried to recreate it once. And slipped. And people died
- tetrep 3y ago
  What about the title implies only laymen were involved? I had no idea going into it who would be doing what.
  - justin66 3y ago
    You thought nuclear security professionals were going to recreate an incredibly expensive nuclear disaster which killed a guy, except actuated by a machine with the humans at a safe distance? And that would have been more educational than just building a model of the thing with a painted foam core?
HPsquared 3y ago
Journalists -and scientists for that matter - don't usually have access to highly enriched fissile material. Nobody would get permission to do this without a very, very good reason.

eprparadox 3y ago

[repost] i was fascinated with the criticality accident that claimed Slotin's life when i first learned about it. in particular, the schematic estimating everyone's distance to the apparatus and how much radiation they may have been exposed to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Slotin_criticality_map.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti... there was a second sketch made from that drawing which i also found fascinating. it doesn't add any additional information or analytical ability, but is just a sort of interesting and slightly dark translation of a rote schematic diagram into an artistic rendering of the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Slotin_criticality_drawing.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#/media/File:Sloti... I searched around for awhile trying to find the purpose and/or author of that second sketch but to no avail. however i did use it as the cover for an EP i released. please enjoy! https://open.spotify.com/artist/37U37SYaXf1varqMgmpHkc?si=zEBqJ0GqTG6jOEqb9tI-Nw&nd=1 https://open.spotify.com/artist/37U37SYaXf1varqMgmpHkc?si=zE...