Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to cry clickbait, but I really thought radioactive material was going to be involved here. Like, setup the accident again with a machine handling the screwdriver. I was very dissapointed to read about an artist's rendition of the accident.

As you can see in other comments, this is a very interesting topic! I think that the shared article adds relativley little, though.

View on HN

...you thought someone was going to be able to get a critical amount of fissile material (originally plutonium) and bring it together using a machine???

I cannot possibly express how thankful I am that doing so is just about impossible for any layman.

Famously, they tried to recreate it once. And slipped. And people died

What about the title implies only laymen were involved? I had no idea going into it who would be doing what.

You thought nuclear security professionals were going to recreate an incredibly expensive nuclear disaster which killed a guy, except actuated by a machine with the humans at a safe distance? And that would have been more educational than just building a model of the thing with a painted foam core?

Journalists -and scientists for that matter - don't usually have access to highly enriched fissile material. Nobody would get permission to do this without a very, very good reason.

Sure, and maybe there's a way to approximate it? I don't know. I'm not particularly well versed on this topic, but when I hear "reconstruction of Foo" I imagine, well, a reconstruction of it. Not an artists visual interpretation of it. This is the first time I've ever seen a recreation in a purely visual sense.

I'm with you. Love the topic. The pictures look excellent. Clearly this is a talented artist. I think a more accurate title might have been "I Painted Pictures of Pictures of Aspects of the Blue Flash." There really wasn't much recreated here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com