The Blue Flash: A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project | Hacker News Reader

The Blue Flash: A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

bbc.com

41 pointsmastazi52 comments

Previous recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36872955

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Making 'The Blue Flash': How I reconstructed a fatal atomic accident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36872955 - July 2023 (61 comments)

A careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36798594 - July 2023 (1 comment)

The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36022373 - May 2023 (59 comments)

The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25317021 - Dec 2020 (1 comment)

Demon Core: The Strange Death of Louis Slotin (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20744425 - Aug 2019 (22 comments)

Demon Core - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20205876 - June 2019 (55 comments)

The blue flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11754713 - May 2016 (1 comment)

Demon Core: The Strange Death of Physicist Louis Slotin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11749742 - May 2016 (34 comments)

I realize this isn't a popular opinion, but it bothers me how those who depict the tragedy of an accident like this seem to do so in the service of painting a dangerous picture of atomic energy, and they do it by ignoring and overlooking other accidental deaths. The Manhattan Project moved blazingly fast, and people died in vehicle accidents, fires, electrocutions, and more. Every death was tragic and represented a life cut short. But it seems like much has been written of Louis Slotin's accident while very little is said of the many others who died more "conventionally".

This is part of the reason that many people have an exaggerated fear of nuclear power when, in fact, the accidental death rate from it (even when you include Chernobyl) is far less than that of petroleum, hydro, and even wind - in some cases by multiple orders of magnitude. It's one of the safest energy sources, but takes a front-seat as the villain of the play when it comes to most articles by media, especially legacy media.

I think the thing that makes this death stand out from the usual run-of-the-mill fatal accident was the fact that the victim was normal and healthy when the accident occurred but could cognizantly look forward to his inevitable death over the next month and there was nothing --absolutely nothing -- that could be done to avoid it. All he could do was get his affairs in order and then sit and wait through the oncoming suffering.

It's not the accidental death, it's the prolonged psychological horror that makes it so tragic.

Same with the Chernobyl disaster. There was a breif moment in time when the engineers could have safely shut the reactor down, but after that moment passed, it became a "choose you own doom adventure" and the rest of the story is more or less about how people coped with that largely unknown fact.

I've had chemo, and this was one of the worst aspects. I could feel myself starving and dying through the process. Had to discuss with family what to do when I died and saw the pain that put on them. I can say with absolute certainty that I don't fear death, I fear dying. If I were exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, the anticipation of the pain and death would make me want to kill myself. I don't have words to describe the psychological effect waiting for a seemingly inevitable death has. I can't imagine how much worse that is without the sliver of hope I had.

I understand and kind of agree with your general point. But nuclear fission accudenta have the potential to render large (on a human acale) areas of land uninhabitable. However unlikely, thats a problem. And we still dont have a good, proven solution to nuclear waste disposal.

(And yes, I understand that carbon-based fuels produce waste too.)

AFAIK, hydroelectricity holds the record on largest area rendered uninhabitable (and largest, most impactful accident), but I guess that's because nobody counts the chemical industry and mining ones correctly.

Seems like the real choice here is to perish via climate change caused by burning fossil fuels - OR - embrace the non-guaranteed but certainly possible dangers of nuclear power. Its a lousy decision to have to make but in my mind it comes down to this.

Its not so much the US and EU that I worry about; Its the less developed nation states. Plenty of potential for F-ups all around but at least we've been doing it successfully for some time in the US/EU.

We should obviously be building nuclear plants as fast as possible while recognizing that they present outsize risks.

I want more nuclear plants, but not if they are run by the same myopic system that gave us Deepwater Horizon.

> And we still dont have a good, proven solution to nuclear waste disposal.

I hear this all the time and I don't get it.

What is bad or unproven about burying the waste in concrete?

I'm in the state where all other US states want to ship their waste. We don't want it. What's wrong with burying it in your state? A few years back, there was an underground fire of this stuff. Your asking "what's so bad" as a non-rhetorical question is a BAD sign of what's so bad...

But carbon-based power generation is actively rendering large areas of land uninhabitable. Global warming isn't an outcome from accidents, that's just what it does. The difference is the plausible deniability and degrees of separation. A wave of heat deaths doesn't look like it's related to the coal mine in the next state over, but it is.

That isn't unique to nuclear power. Coal seam fires can also render larges areas uninhabitable, and they can burn for hundreds if not thousands of years.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

The silver lining is we got the Silent Hill games.

We do have a solution - just bury it underground. And the best part is: it gets safer with time!

The trick is picking a place to bury it; apparently all the US states with suitable locations for nuclear plants somehow lack suitable locations for waste storage, or else they wouldn't insist on shipping it to a state without any nuclear plants at all (oh but it was also the one state that got repeatedly nuked during tests, so I guess that makes it okay).

I remember an anti-nuclear talking about the Finnish project for long term storage.

He was depicting the project cost (4 billions) as ridicolously high and therefore unfeasible. Interesting that each plant (around 10 billions?) of Finland could use it for 100 years... seems like a no brainer to me!

Well said. I actually just wrote a comment to appreciate the non-drama of the article. But it's true - the same article could have been written about that guy that probably got crushed during construction or had an unlucky encounter on the highway.

I guess the "flash of blue light" carrying silent death is itself an unnecessary dramatization of a dull accident. :S

> conventionally

That's everything. Nuclear deaths were socially significant because they were novel. "Hey everyone, here is a new way to die." And everyone paid attention.

Another example: Covid. It's a coronavirus. Know what else is a coronavirus? The common cold. But because Covid was novel, "hey everyone, here is a new way to die." And everyone paid attention.

    But because Covid was novel

Do you think the fact that it was orders of magnitude more fatal and transmissible had anything to do with it, or do you truly think it was just the "novelty" factor?

I didn't say novelty. I said novel, which has a specific definition

> orders of magnitude more fatal

Really? From what I understand the IFR for covid without vaccination was somewhere in the range of 0.5% to maybe 1%, versus the flu at 0.1%. 10x worse; that would be one order of magnitude. That's for the normal flu, the Spanish Flu was much worse than either, about 10% e.g. two orders of magnitude. At three orders of magnitude you're already talking about near certain death.

Apologies, but I'm certain you've misread the parent post to which I was responding. They wrote:

    Another example: Covid. It's a coronavirus. Know what 
    else is a coronavirus? The common cold. But because Covid 
    was novel [...]

They explicitly (and rather unbelievably) compared COVID-19 to the common cold, not the flu.

Wrong thread.

There are a lot of controversial aspects to COVID-19 that are perhaps best avoided on HN, but the assertion that it's far more dangerous than the common cold is hardly a controversial statement.

> I realize this isn't a popular opinion

I think on HN this actually /is/ the popular opinion.

You probably have the same number of coal miners dying every year in accidents than died in the entire history of nuclear power. That's without counting all those who die from breathing arsenic, nickel, cadmium and other toxic by-products of coal combustion.

The reason why there’s a ton of attention in nuclear disaster is because of the damage potential.

"A careless slip" really undersells all of the deliberate bad decisions that set the stage for a single slip to have such devastating consequences. Imagine I have decided to balance a bucket of burning gasoline on my head. One slip is disastrous, but focusing on the slip seems myopic.

Yeah. The slip wasn’t the careless part, the protocol was. After those criticality accidents (there were 2 with the same core!) they finally decided to adopt reasonable precautions and switch to remote-operated testing of the cores.

But it really does sell the grand tragedy that it is. Thoughtful and comprehensive analysis does not sell well.

I think it would be a more interesting and useful article if it focused more on the normalization of needless risk taking, particularly Slotin's history with reckless bravado. Giving that sort of background would teach a lesson people can apply to their own lives (being young and brave doesn't make you invincible), and also give the article an excuse to talk about other sensational events like the time Slotin decided to go swimming with a nuclear reactor.

That begs the question: What's more tragic, a preventable or an unpreventable accident?

I think a preventable one. Consider the Air France 447 accident. It came to be due to various conditions. But I remember a lot of headlines about "if only the pilots had not done anything, the plane would have cleared the weather and keep on flying". I think putting the whole thing into a "single slip" enhances the drama.

Yet slips are bound to happen, while systematic security measures could have prevented the accident even in the presence of slips. Though perhaps there is a difference between drama and tragedy. Or between superficial and thoughtful.

A dramatization of the accident was part of the film Fat Man and Little Boy, clip below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ0P7R9CfCY

A little more factual dramatization was presented in the TV show Dark Matters titled "Risky Radiation" but I am unable to locate a video clip atm.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2421370/?ref_=ttep_ep4

There also was a Stargate SG-1 episode about it (Meridian)

Kudos to the article for not fuelling radiation-related fears!

Slotin died because a stupid, preventable accident, and Plutonium is indeed dangerous. But stupid, preventable accidents happen in many industries and they are just as lethal. I appreciate that the events are well described, but no unnecessary rethoric is added to that.

(I'm still burnt by the amount of gut-wrenching drama they added in Chernobyl)

One of the safety training stories at the lab I used to work at was about a chemist who set his lunchtime hamburger on the shelf in the fume hood while running reactions with a potent methylating agent. Slow painful death over the course of a week. Definitely put the fear of god in me.

Lab safety wasn't thing and the people in the lab resisted any attempt to create it. It's no surprise people died.

In this case, Louis Slotin was the safety mechanism. Different times…

I’m currently reading Command and Control which dives into nuclear safety and more interestingly, accidents. I recommend it: https://books.google.com/books/about/Command_and_Control.htm...

> Some 60 million people died in World War II. On average, 27,000 people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)

If you believed in earnest (as they did) that the atomic bombs stood a very good chance of shortening WWII, there was absolutely no case for safety regulations short of preventing accidents that wiped out large numbers of lab personnel. Even a single day's delay would kill over a thousand times as many people as lives you'd save.

Yeah. Slotkin's accident was of course boneheaded (and nuclear nations should bear responsibility for their actions) but I'm amazed and dismayed at how articles like this characterize the lack of safety culture as mere carelessness or hubris.

The Americans knew that the Nazis were working on atomic weapons and believed (entirely reasonably, but incorrectly) that the Nazis were likely ahead of them. What was the safety risk of a nuclear-armed Adolf Hitler?

We might as well criticize the lack of "safety culture" on D-Day or at the Battle of Stalingrad. These were people doing desperate, daring things in dangerous times at an intentionally breakneck pace.

Slotkin's accident occurred in 1946 after the war ended, so Germany was not a looming threat at that instant. But we had similar concerns about the USSR's nuclear weapons program at that time.

Yes - multiple near-critical screw-ups at the Los Alamos lab. People seemed surprisingly casual in handling of something that could (and did) kill them.

Bear in mind that the incident was only a little more than a decade after this photo was taken: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunch_atop_a_Skyscraper

"Workplace safety" is a comparatively modern invention.

That picture was a publicity stunt. Workplace safety back then was bad (as reported by the number of deaths), but not that bad.

Point taken, but it's still illustrative - could you do that photo now? Without safety harnesses and so forth? In the mid 30s you could.

A long time ago I mentioned this story to my dad, an engineer of the mechanical kind. He said, in his simple way, why was the system built that way? Why not lift the core up rather than drop the reflector down? If anything goes wrong, the default is it stops.

I know it’s silly but I think of what he said often. So many times the solution to a problem at work is to bring in more tech, another stack, more complexity while in his world it was “what can we take out of this loop so there’s less to go wrong?”

I wonder what he’d think of modern engine power trains and all their gubbins.

Pop-culture tangent: Does anyone know if Slotin's story was the inspiration for Dr. Manhattan's orgin story in _The Watchmen_? Many resonances between the two.

Maybe, but I lean towards assuming not. Most (all?) of the characters in Watchmen were Charlton Comics characters with the serial numbers scratched off, and their backstories adjusted slightly to fit the setting. Dr. Manhattan specifically was based on Captain Atom, whose origin was originally that he was trapped in a rocket as it launched. The change from that to the "intrinsic field" experiment was probably just to make it more "weird" along with Ozymandias' actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Atom

> The character's origin had Adam working as a technician in a special experimental rocket when it accidentally launched with him trapped inside. Adam was atomized when the rocket exploded while entering the upper atmosphere. However, he somehow gained superpowers that included the ability to reform his body safely on the ground

jeez this is evergreen.

I wonder if it's because it shows instances of profound stupidity among people we tend to credit as very smart, or if it's just fascination with the exotic and dangerous world of criticality.

unfortunate that it kind of gives oxygen to the "nuclear cooties" phobia.

What's crazy about the Slotin incident is that it occurred in 1946, months after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. This wasn't some unavoidable "race to beat the Nazis to the bomb" accident, it was just tragic sloppiness.

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