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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

I would have though the decision tree for placement of concentrated plutonium was firmly established after the demon core incidents, set roughly in stone as the following:

    Should I bring high purity plutonium samples together?

    |
    V

    Do you want to die a horrible radiated death taught in textbooks for decades?

    |            |
    V            V

   No.          Yes

    |            |
    V            V

 Then don’t    you’re fired.

It seems like Los Alamos may be in need of a fresh printout of the above & a photocopier + stapler to adhere a copy to the foreheads of all of their technicians.

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Your flowchart neglects to mention the potential upside: Do you want to experience the results of runaway nuclear chain reaction firsthand? Become a Wikipedia entry? Impress the labmates with your prowess at tickling the dragon's tail?

Hey, there’s a first time for everything!

also. Test the superhero hypothesis that being exposed to radiation causes you to become xmen

Only in the sense that you become a former alive-type human.

Do your job? Is "warhead core built following elementary safety standards" the nuclear version of "seven mutually perpendicular red lines drawn on a 2d page with green ink"?

> Los Alamos's managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards

> it hasn't produced a usable new warhead core in at least six years

I want to believe that the situation is as simple as replacing some stubborn lab managers and putting a new training program in place, but who the hell shuts down operations for six years just to preserve the bro culture? I don't buy it. Bureaucracies demand contradictions all the time, though, and they never run out of surprise at the real world's failure to abide by their contradictory requirements.

> PF-4 is also the only place where existing cores removed randomly from the arsenal can be painstakingly tested

The fact that the lab has unique duties presents a unique opportunity for such a tangle to happen.

"Then don’t - you’re fired."

It's much worse than that. Put simply, at this late juncture, it's fucking outrageous that it happened at all!

When Harry Daghlian died from a criticality accident that occurred in August 1945 he wasn't the first to be in such an accident but he was the first fatality—and he should have been the last: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Daghlian

This accident occurred some 66 years later:

• So what the hell were these irresponsible turkeys trying to prove?

• Why weren't they trained to the extent of developing a negative Pavlovian response at even the thought of carrying out such a dangerous and risky operation?

• Where were the well-established procedures that began with Daghlian's death in 1945 and why weren't they in place and operational at the time?

• What the fuck were the nuclear safety officers doing at the time?

• And what the fuck were their bosses doing to let occupational work conditions have or reach the potential where it was even feasible for such an accident to happen let alone the fact that it did?

The fact that this accident occurred should have had heads rolling all the way from the lab across to the top of DOE because it is the responsibility of everybody in that chain of command to ensure that operating procedures are such that an accident of this kind could never happen. (Such work and operational procedures associated with it should be treated and modeled as a critical system and analyzed as such.)

Incidentally, I've worked in the nuclear industry albeit (very fortunately) never at the level of ever having to handle Pu under those conditions, nevertheless I've sufficient knowledge of regulations to know that what happened here was well outside the bounds of all normal procedures and operations.

Simply, it just shouldn't have been possible for this to happen—and even if through some force majeure—Act of God—that it was possible and that it was likely to happen then the fact that 'interlock procedures' didn't automatically drop into place as a default backup protection tells me something has seriously gone wrong with the administration of this Los Alamos lab.

If a scientist wanted to commit suicide, couldn’t he trigger the criticality event just to see what it’s like and then promptly kill himself off afterward before radiation effects set in? Or is the agony instant?

By all the accounts I've read, there should be some lag time sufficient to commit suicide, unless you're knocked out (they usually wake before the worst of it, though not always), and excepting temperature burns.

But somewhat like quantum suicide, it may be the type of experiment where even a tiny chance of the corner case is still a complete turn-off. Your insides slowly liquifying seems to be one of the worst ways--possibly the worst way--to meet your end.

EDIT: In retrospect, if you're the Los Alamos version of the Hold-my-beer type--judging by the article and especially the photo, such people apparently exist--I suppose it might not be a complete turn-off. (I'm imagining the guy handing his beer and a bullet to his buddy, instructing to give him one or the other depending on the outcome.)

Even people who have received 100x the lethal dose don't die instantly - it's an agonizing death either way. If you're concious and know you've going to die then yeah, I think killing yourself, or at least being put into an irreversible coma is the only way to handle this. Otherwise it's pure agony for hours/days/weeks.

While radiation isn't a poison, in this case it's similar enough: the higher the dose, the more likely (or faster) the death.

But you might raise some red flags if your workplace notices you doing calculations to calculate criticality experiments next to calculations of human radiation dose levels and lethality.

In this specific case, I highly doubt there were any calculations involved. The fact that it seems there were many people involved in setting up this stupid photo makes me believe even less in the future of humanity. I mean, it's Homer Simpson levels of nuclear handling irresponsibility.

One of the things mentioned was how horribly painful Harry Daghlian's death was. There are much quicker and less painful ways to go.

No one gets to play with that much radioactive stuff without all sorts of safety briefings. If you were that depressed then your co-workers would notice and would turn you in.

Fired or fried?

plausibly both

That would depend on whether they read the flow chart before or after coming to a decision. But I think it would almost always be an either/or, not both:

It would seem a little unethical to fire someone after they fried themselves & thereby performed a great service, making the next generation of techs much more likely to keep themselves both in the gene pool & lifelong contributors to scientific knowledge through their career.

Consider those fried persons & object lessons to be sort of the “Leeroy Jenkins” of their profession.

At least they got chicken?

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