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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Talented and Stupid

At the same time. It killed him and injured others. Louis Slotin was working on supercriticality experiments on a fission plutonium bomb.  

I'm thinking this is how NOT to do a test with live Plutonium.


The screwdriver slipped and the mass went critical. He stopped the reaction but he was dead already. In fact nine days later. 
 

8 comments:

  1. If you haven't seen it, check out the film "Fat Man and Little Boy"... this particular incident is touched on. And the Wiki entry on the Demon Core is pretty fascinating...

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  2. Ah, yes, the "Demon Core".

    It killed another couple of people before it was finally used in a test shot.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

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  3. It does make one wonder, sometimes...

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  4. Yea! We have a spammer! I don't generally approve such stuff, but this was epic! Go away!

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  5. Borepatch and I both got the same spam.

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  6. Yep, the learning curve was rather steep back then... And he paid with his life!

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