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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

> They'd tested bringing two pieces of enriched uranium close together in criticality experiments. That experiment killed several people at Los Alamos.

I think the fatal criticality accidents at Los Alamos involved a single chunk of plutonium and neutron reflectors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

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The Demon core story is quite fascinating, I compiled several Wikipedia articles to construct the full narrative: https://svedic.org/history/demon-core

Anytime I'm jimmying something open with a screwdriver I can't help think of this story and how crazy dangerous holding two hemispheres of plutonium apart with a screwdriver really is.

I loved this read!

So good

This same failure most recently occurred at Sarov in the late 90's, killing one. https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1106_scr.p...

That's a surprisingly accessible read and I would recommend it to folks curious about "what does intense irradiation do to the human body". But it's also quite haunting.

Exactly. I won’t comment on the scientists confidence, but getting a chunk of plutonium to go critical isn’t that hard.

Getting it to go critical in a consistent way is hard. Slam two sub-critical pieces together with your hands and it will go critical then blow itself apart, going sub-critical. Little energy release and more just throwing plutonium around.

They didn't have E6000 back in those days.

A T-1000 could have done it by hand, if they'd send one back.

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