On 21 August 1945, Los Alamos scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. suffered fatal radiation poisoning after dropping a tungsten carbide brick onto a sphere of plutonium. The brick acted as a neutron reflector, bringing the mass to criticality. This was the first known criticality accident causing a fatality.
On 21 May 1946, another Los Alamos scientist, Louis Slotin, accidentally irradiated himself during a similar incident, when a critical mass experiment with the very same sphere of plutonium (see demon core) took a wrong turn. Immediately realizing what had happened he quickly disassembled the device, likely saving the lives of seven fellow scientists nearby. Slotin succumbed to radiation poisoning nine days later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident
A shovel full of coal does the same thing. When you throw wood into a fireplace it happens too.
;O)
This is why I don’t let the kids play with Plutonium.
lol!!
Don’t you need one tiny piece of dust of it to die and these guys had a big ball of it.
It took some digging but the official source for that wiki content and the photos comes from this PDF:
A Review of Criticality Accidents. 2000 Revision. Los Alamos [la-13638.pdf]
Very interesting reading. Probably shouldn’t be declassified though.
What was the point of the expirement? Especially when they knew the danger of it?