Many Scientists Become Victims in the Demon Core
- Laboratorium Nasional Los Alamos
Alamos knew the risks when they experimented with a device to measure the threshold at which plutonium would become supercritical, the point at which a nuclear chain reaction would unleash an explosion. The trick the scientists at the Manhattan Project pulled off was to discover how far humans could go before the dangerous reaction spread.
Manhattan’s mission is to discover how far humans can go before the dangerous reaction spreads. They even had informal nicknames for the high-risk experiments, which deadened the danger of what they were doing.
They chanted 'tickle the dragon's tail', knowing that if they were unlucky enough to wake the angry beast, they would be scorched. high-risk, which signaled the danger of what they were doing.
And that's exactly what happened to Los Alamos physicist Harry Daghlian. On the night of August 21, 1945, Daghlian returned to the lab after dinner, to tickle the dragon's tail alone, with no other scientists (just a security guard) around, which was a breach of safety protocols.
As Daghlian worked, he surrounded the plutonium sphere with bricks made of tungsten carbide, which reflected neutrons shed by the core back at it, edging it closer to criticality.
Brick by brick, Daghlian built up these reflective walls around the core, until his neutron-monitoring equipment indicated the plutonium was about to go supercritical if he placed any more. He moved to pull one of the bricks away, but in doing so accidentally dropped it directly onto the top of the sphere, inducing supercritical and generating a glow of blue light and a wave of heat.
Daghlian reached out immediately and removed the brick, noticing a tingling sensation in his hand as he did so. Unfortunately, it was already too late.
In that brief instant, he had received a lethal dose of radiation. His burnt, irradiated hand blistered over, and he eventually fell into a coma after weeks of nausea and pain. He was dead just 25 days after the accident. The security guard on duty also received a non-lethal dose of radiation.
